In this edition of Ignite University, John Lincoln and Jay Abraham discuss key business concepts that are sure to double your revenue.
As one of the top marketers in the world, Jay has spent his entire career helping executives solve problems and fix businesses.
Listen to learn more about his unique approach to business strategy and how he’s significantly increased the bottom lines of over 10,000 clients worldwide.
Listen to the Podcast or Read the Full Transcript Below
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher or Player.fm.
Full Transcript:
John Lincoln: Okay everybody, welcome to Ignite visibility University. Today I am so excited I have Jay Abraham.
Jay Abraham, if you don’t know who he is, is Founder and CEO of the Abraham group and he’s recognized as one of the world’s most successful impact marketing strategist business innovators entrepreneurial advisors and mentors, and he’s a master of revenue and performance enhancement and acceleration.
So Jay has spent the last 30 plus years solving problems and significantly increasing the bottom lines of over 10,000 clients and more than 400 industries worldwide, and Abraham has really identified the patterns that limit and restrict business growth and shown his clients how to create a powerful advantage over their competition by taking success concepts from different industries and adapting them for clients and specific businesses. So’s he’s really good at just jumping in finding out what’s wrong with a business and propelling it.
So Jay, welcome to the Ignite visibility University podcast, so excited to have you here. How are you doing today?
Jay Abraham: I’m good. And that was very gracious. I wish my wife could hear that, she might not yell at me for not taking the garbage out all the time.
So, I’m good, thank you very much. Beautiful day. It’s Friday. We have an office right on an airport runway and we watch on Fridays. All the wealthy entrepreneurs have all their world war two planes and their biplanes and it’s it’s joy to watch them all happen. It’s a great day. Great day.
John Lincoln: Beautiful day, got got a lovely Friday and I’m just so excited to talk to you today. We have so many mutual connections who are newer to me.
And I think the first thing I want to start with is what’s new with you. What’s your current role, and after so many years of success in the marketing field, what are you up to nowadays?
Jay Abraham: Well, it’s a great question, and I’ll tell you what we’re not up to, which is interesting: we’re not selling very much stuff.
I’ve done three things. I’ve gone back to my roots, where when I started, I just worked with private companies that had a lot of moving parts that weren’t being optimized. They had a lot of buyers, prospects, inactive buyers, distributors, brands, salespeople, trade shows, and we do a lot of stuff with people that do that.
And I also have been very blessed to do a lot of work around the world with some very complex companies that have challenged me to grow my knowledge and intellect and my worldview, but we also have been doing a lot of developmental research. Over my career, I went through a burst of really powerful distinctions early and we did that Three-Way to Grow Business and we did the Power Parthenon, and we did the Nine Drivers of Exponential Growth and we did Sticking Points and we did Strategy Preeminence.
And then I stopped in the last couple of months. I’ve gotten very, very focused on three or four other distinctions, which are worth titillating – and then we can talk about it if you want to John – one is basically what I call Leverage Marketing. It’s taking all the sub-processes in any revenue system and focusing on maximizing, multiplying, and and growing them.
And there are a lot of them; it’s like 100 with 161 that I found that most people don’t even know exists between the big macro areas that people lo at and that are the denominators, and in that KPIs.
Most people look at the other thing that I’ve done which is really cool. I have a partner who’s the former senior strategic advisor to Texas Pacific Group, and if you don’t know what that is, it’s a huge private equity fund and he and I’ve been working on a concept that I think is utterly important for everyone to understand. It’s called Relevancy Rules, and the concept is dual. It’s a double entendre; one is acknowledging that the foundational font of everything that happens in our personal or business life has to do with relevancy – things I say or don’t say things I do or don’t do each time has the ability to enrich or diminish your relevancy in someone’s eyes.
You’re doing a segment with me with people that don’t know me, or that might have heard of me are going to watch. If I come across as lame and incoherent and vapid and vacuous they’re going to think, well, he certainly doesn’t live up to his brand status and they’ll never perhaps give me the answer. People think that every time you have an interaction you have a chance to enrich and fortify the relationship. But more often than not, it’s the opposite, and you’re in control of your relevancy, and it has to do with with a lot of networks.
Not networking, but the kinds of relationships you have cultivated in a multitude of interactions and elements of your business or personal life, and each one has different weighted dynamic meaning ever-changing importance, and I can go deeper but that’s something that really turns me on, and the other is called activating absolute advantage and the concept is that everything we do is personal business. There are a lot of factors for it, tangible vs. intangible elements, and if you activate them and apply them, it’s going to give you a higher probability of success and failure, and more certainty in a more impactful outcome.
And then the last thing is what I call Beyond Exponential. And this is really cool. And I’m going to frustrate myself.
I’ve always talked about the fact that each one of the strategies or categories that I’ve created gives somebody the ability to work, to produce geometric or exponential gain, but that’s because I’ve done maybe 10 different categories. Each one is like it’s exponential on exponential exponential, and I could never really understand it. And finally one day, I looked it up. And in fact, there are five or six levels beyond exponential that you can get to, and mathematically their exponential creation is one – that’s the one we’re talking about – it’s Pen or Asian Xex Asian or another with a B and then oxidation, and they’re mathematically so big in there so hyper operational that they don’t even. They don’t even compute, they’re off the off the chart. And I’m not trying to be esoteric, but if you think about it, you really can take a business and multiply its performance beyond exponential, though most people don’t even get there.
I could go on, but that’s the kind of stuff that turns me on.
John Lincoln: I love it, I love it. And you know from the things I’ve learned doing research and knowing about you, it sounds like
you like to productize your strategy, in a way, and give it a name and then you get to share that concept with the world.
And some of the things that you just mentioned seem like you put a name on a specific strategy. I was looking at Triangulation, Strategic Alliances, the 100 X Profit Multiplier System and the ones that you just mentioned. Those are cool new concepts that you’re pumped up about that are next-level type of stuff.
So is that kind of part of your process? When you find something that works, do you name it so you can share with others?
Jay Abraham: Well, I do. And I think I do it for a trilogy of reasons, John.
First, when you make something proprietary it is valued higher than a generic number. It has more importance in the mind’s eye of the audience it’s intended for.
And number three, it has in durability, as opposed to just sort of dissipating. Over my life I’ve been blessed because early on I was very accelerated. Then I probably was a little bit delayed because as I talk to you, I’m not as active online as I am in a multitude of other areas. And over the last few years I’ve gotten more accelerated just because I’ve gotten introduced to so many more elevated and sophisticated ways of thinking. And I’m not trying to be arrogant or rude. It’s just that I’ve gotten exposed to so many cool things. And when you try to distill it and process it you can you can torque it down to the lowest common denominator to finally explain it to somebody. It gives them enormous power and growth potential.
When we did the Three-Way to Grow a Business model, nobody had ever explained how simple you can harness geometry and how much
easier it is to grow exponentially than incrementally. When we did Tunnel Vision Verses Funnel Vision, we were able to show people that the majority of their competitors and themselves were all following the herd. But if you borrowed a multitude of successful approaches from outside industries and combine it into a hybrid nobody else had, it gave you the power of the one-eyed man in the land of the blind.
And yeah, I’ve always given whatever my distinctions were a proprietary name for two reasons. One, I wanted them to have legacy value, whether I benefited or not, because I thought that the entrepreneur – small, medium, large – they’re an endangered species. They’re the foundation of all that’s good about capitalism, all that worthy about challenge fulfillment and creation value. And I think they need all the help they can get. And if you give them devices that have powerful reverent sort of names they can really associate with, I think it motivates them more to utilize them and to believe in them. But that’s just my belief.
John Lincoln: I absolutely love it. I absolutely love it. I actually went through a similar process with my company not too long ago where we tried to productize a lot of the strategy, and it was very good. It brought a lot of clarity, nothing compared to the body of work that you have from doing this for so long –
Jay Abraham: I’m a lot older than you; you are just starting out.
John Lincoln: I just started. Someday. I’ll keep at it.
Now my next question would be, when you think back and forward – maybe something you just made, or maybe it’s something from 30 years ago – is there any of those strategies that you think, “Oh, that one’s my favorite.” Is there, like a top five or top five hit list that when you meet a new business owner s- say we just met, which we just did, but you know you’d say “John I want to improve your business. I recommend you look at these couple because they’re fundamental and will do more for you than others.”
Jay Abraham: Yes. And they would be the two Variations of of Three Ways to Grow Gusiness.
There’s a basic and there’s an advanced one, the Power Parthenon and Strategy of Preeminence. Always. Those are the ones that I would start with, and then depending on the company or the business or the or the challenges I could navigate a lot of different ones. But then I go into always leveraging up the impact points are that are the performance enhancers, and there’s a ton of them, and it’s a mix and match.
I can probably interpret a lot of the other ones in similar ways, but those are the Three Ways to Grow a Business model both basic and advanced. There’s a lot of it. If you want to get granular it’s got about 40 different techniques and factors, and one of them is risk reversal, which is a huge factor in really building trust and compelling people to take action.
John Lincoln: Tell me a little bit about risk reversal. Just a little bit with with the current climate, economically. Why is that important to businesses?
Jay Abraham: Well, it’s always been important and it’s even more important today. But it’s only important if you grasp, not just the magnitude but the full-on psychological requirements of articulating and personifying it today. When I started nobody understood it at all. And it wasn’t original to me, but I discovered it and rediscovered it. My whole understanding of it was anytime two people join together to transact anything, business, romance fraternity, community, one side is always consciously or subconsciously, implicitly or explicitly, knowingly or unknowingly asking the other side to take on more than a portion of the risk. And the risk can be meaningful in a relationship if it’s business and they’d want to use it to hire you. They have to believe you’re going to pay off and give them an ROI or be a contribution to the business. If it’s romance, they have to feel like you’re going to make them happier, better, more secure and be physically, sexually fulfilled, whatever it is. If it’s community that you’re adding your politics to, you’re going to do better for the community or the majority of weighted voters are. If it’s for eternity that your friendship is going to be rich and meaningful. It’s not always understood. A lot of it is implicit.
But if you can grasp what the tangible and intangible factors are, and you can either mitigate them overcome them, or even more than overcome them, then you basically make it easier in whatever the application for someone is to say yes. The problem today is that it’s become so prevalent that it almost is used to be an advantage. Today it’s utilized by most people as sort of a standard of doing business today. You have to really elevate it I think to a much higher level of interpretive application and I can give you an example, if you like.
John Lincoln: Yes, please.
Jay Abraham: Well, when it first started, it was just a 30 day money-back guarantee.
Yeah, there are variations of it. You can say key product will get you a bonus, or will give you $25 and things like that. Today, if you just say any of those everybody and their brother says that it’s moved
So let’s use an example, let’s say that I was selling a supplement and let’s say it was a multi-purpose supplement. Well, instead of saying 30 day guarantee or your money back or satisfaction guarantee, which you can just evaluate yourself and how compelling that is, what if I said instead that unless, John, within the first 45 days of using it you can’t honestly say to yourself – and to me if we talked – that a you’re starting to a.) to sleep like a baby, b.) when you wake up, you have infinitely more energy, c.) your acuity, your concentration is unimaginably more laserlike and people are are commenting that you look healthier, you look more radiant, that your overall emotional balance and your stress level is down.
If I can’t honestly produce those kind of outcomes for you on or before the 45th day, all you have to do is take it away. It’s recommended one morning one after lunch and one before dinner. If I can’t do that, I don’t think I deserve to keep your money and I would expect you to send it back. Is that a little bit more compelling?
John Lincoln: Well, I just absolutely love that. I mean, the idea of what is the main risk with selecting any product or any service and then directly addressing that and finding a way to address that risk. To all the listeners listening right now, you just got an awesome piece of information. I hope you take that away. I hope you bring that to your own business and you find a way to do risk reversal for your clients and, Jay, when I think about this, I wonder if people really go deep enough to understand their customers? I just feel like that’s kind of a pain point that I’ve seen and from looking at your body of work, you do challenge people to go deeper. Is that part of it?
Jay Abraham: It’s more than part of it. It’s a vital, essential, critical, immutable part of it John and here’s why.
One of the real problems, and this has happened in many different phenomenons, when infomercials first came out, you could almost do anything you wanted, and the consumer was impressed that they would buy. When the internet first happened you could put bullets and hyperbole, and anything you wanted, people would buy.
Today, when you have a discriminating, well educated and skeptical buyer who’s got three things: far too much distraction – I have a concept, also, I forgot to mention called access denied. And it’s really what’s going on with the consumer, they’re denying people access to their trust, to their mind, their transaction and we can go into that later. But when you have that kind of an environment, you have to really have empathic, appreciative, understanding for what it’s like to be in their shoes. You have to examine, understand, appreciate, respect, and acknowledge what their life is like. And you can’t do that with a bunch of hyperbolic words.
The greatest practitioners of marketing throughout history, they would go door to door, they would go with salespeople,they would not just interview in a research group, they would just deal with the consumer where they were. I have found it very shocking when I get a client, John, I say, Okay, let’s look at all the competitive knowledge you’ve got to have of your direct competitors – online, offline, what do they do, what are they positioning, what’s the value proposition, what are the attributes they’re offering? What is it about them that is superior? Inferior? How do you rank?
Then I ask them about alternative means because that’s the problem you’re trying to solve. The opportunity you’re trying to fulfill may be singular, but the alternative ways people have of doing it are mulitple, and to give you an example, might be selling a supplement you for weight loss, but there’s alternatives. They can basically watch a video, do online training, live training, portion control, buy a piece of equipment, buy a book.
And then you’ve got the ultimate competition, which is inertia. In its contemplation, equivocation, procrastination. If you don’t understand all that there’s no way you can be masterful or great. You’re going to be at best, suboptimal. At worst, you’re going to be mediocre and even worse. Worse, you’re going to be unsuccessful.
John Lincoln: I absolutely love that. No, it’s great, and one of the things I see we get in so many different types of clients. Some people will just throw up a product and just expect it to sell or offer a service and just expect it to sell. But, if you really take the time to understand your customer, to get into those exact pain points to and risk reversal, not only is that going to help with your online marketing and the way that you’re actually putting content on your pages and addressing how those things will help your sales reps, it’ll help your traditional marketing. It’ll help the business in general and can also help with internal workflows, and I just think that’s great information for all of our listeners.
One of the things I think about a lot is this concept that you have on this idea of relationship capital, and I find that to be important in business. But I was wondering if you could just explain that a little bit to us and why that’s something that’s important to you, and how business owners can take more advantage of that.
Jay Abraham: Well, it’s very important. I got started in my life helping companies that had very limited capital capability, and I had to figure out how to get the equivalent buying power of the capital without it. I call it now the Unlimited Checkbook, being able to write checks that only get cashed if, when and after they produce a profit well beyond their cost. And I had to figure out how to persuade people to allow us to utilize their distribution, their advertising, their brand currency, their access, their products, their services. I realized that many, many, many companies that deal with the same market you do have already spent years and millions of dollars in producing commerce with that audience where they created inordinate trust, credibility, and access, and that most people when they’re starting out, they’re going into a cold market.
And you’re in marketing, and you teach people online and a lot of people make money with Facebook and Instagram and search. But the truth of the matter is, if you think about it, what you’re really doing in any other media is the outer periphery of first stage trust-building, which has to be – normally, unless you’ve got great brand currency – it has to be evolved and reinforced and fortified over communication stages, funnels, whatever you want to call it, before people will part with their commitment and money. And oftentimes, the first parting is only a modest amount, whereas you can bypass all that. You can go right to somebody who’s already got the trust and the respect and the access.
I mean when I started I sold 5000 to $20,000 programs 30 years ago. Direct, without any front end at all. And we did 250 million dollars because I didn’t do it in the open market. I went to everybody that already had the trust. I went to financial newsletters, Success Magazine, Tony Robbins, everybody else and got them to partner with me. But I’ve done about 150 different variations. There’s like 40 you get 43 different attributes. We’ve done things as cool as getting control of somebody’s brand for something else and then flipping that for a lot of money in a piece of the deal and not even touching it. If you can think about, you know what nothing down real estate is, I’ve got nothing down asset and access, acquisition and flipping assets. But we’ve done, again, about $2 billion worldwide using variations of this and one of the greatest stories, and you’ll get a kick out of this, you’re too young, but almost anybody would know this. The greatest example I can give you, it’s age-old and it would happen 30, 40, 50 years ago.
So there’s an insurance company called Colonial Pen. Colonial Pen started out being the company that was designed to do groups – large affinity groups – and they were struggling and struggling and struggling. And finally, somebody came up with a really elegantly simple idea. They said, we can’t break into a group. Let’s start our own. And they started the AARP American Association. While they were good marketers, they made money upfront on the membership. Tt became a profit center, but it became the host, if you will.
I’ve got another concept called host beneficiary. It’s a derivative. This is for billions and billions of dollars of insurance sales, but I built a company that did $500 billion a year for a client using using newsletters, goodwill, trust and relational capital. The product that’s very prominent right now is Icy Hot. I was involved in the beginning. And we had no money and we persuaded 1000 radio stations TV stations magazines, newspapers, and companies selling products to elderly, and used that profile to allow us to run ads and only pay for results to run inserts, but there you have it.
I’ve got so many ways to do it. And it’s allowed me to, you know, my whole brand would be nothing if I didn’t have the benefit of helping people and then having them trust me enough to allow me to utilize their brand currency, their distribution channel, their access vehicles, their affinity, goodwill and trust, and anybody can do it at any level. I can go on and on, but it’s worth it. I mean, think about this: you can access millions of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars of other companies investments, tangible and intangible years of their effort, millions of dollars and payroll they have, facilities they paid for and get total ethical advantage of that instantaneously if you understand how to do it. That’s pretty powerful.
John Lincoln: That’s the key. I love that. Ignite visibility University, another amazing piece of knowledge and really the key to exponential growth. The other day I was speaking to somebody who’s a friend of yours, Jay, and I said, I’m looking to basically get in front of more businesses that have hundreds to thousands of locations. And he said, well, who is already connected to those people? Who’s a consultant who already has all of those connections? How can you reach out to that person? So that kind of channel sales, that exponential growth, getting into one pocket – and I will say the one thing that that takes a little bit, and that not everybody has, is you need to have a little bit of courage, you need a bit of confidence, you need a little bit of scrappiness. I think that’s a little bit of a part of it as well. Would you say it takes a little bit of that?
Jay Abraham: It does, but it also takes – and this is what most people don’t understand – it takes a realization that unbeknownst to a lot of companies and a lot of organizations and a lot of media, they have a bigger problem than you do. Your problem is to try to do some kind of a collaborative transaction with them. Their problem is they get some cost from the relationship. They get a finite yield. They don’t realize that there’s all kinds of ways that they can benefit so much more from adding non duplicated, what I would call expansive revenue. To give you an example, many years ago, and it’s not as as doable today because it’s changed. But when I first started working with Tony Robbins, he had a finite number of training offerings. He went all the way up to what was called Mastery University. It was a 10-day program that was an integration of everything – business, finance, relationships. And that was all he had. There was nothing else above that, there was no platinum group. There was no Business Masters, there was no Advanced Business Mastery.
So I went to him and I said, give me everybody who’s already bought everything else you got to sell them. You’ve got nothing else to sell. You got a sunk cost. He had 10,000 or 15,000, and these are the people that bought everything out of the 200,000 or 300,000, and those 200,000 or 300,000 were the ones that bought all the back end after Guffey Rancor had spent 50 or 100 million dollars of their money building Tony’s tape buyers and CD buyers originally for Personal Power.
And I got access to the core of the core for nothing but giving Tony a share. And the first time we mailed, it wasn’t online. It was old days, we mailed 15,000, if that was the number, and it cost $7,000 and we brought in 9 million. That’s the power of relational capital. But he endorsed it. Does that make sense?
John Lincoln: Oh, I absolutely love that and thank you for the work that you’ve done with Tony. We all appreciate and we all appreciate you. He’s just a great client and we obviously love him.
So you’ve got all these great concepts, and I don’t want to take too much more of your time, but I really just appreciate you being here and sharing. And I just think people are going to learn so much just from those few core concepts, and if if they’re actionable. Ignite listeners, if you make them actionable for yourself, you’re going to see success.
So there’s a couple things that I find interesting. You have these two concepts and one is triangulation. And then you’ve got this Hundred X Internal Multipliers system, a profit multiplier system. I wanted to ask you about one of the two. Which one would you rather chat about? Which one speak to you at the moment?
Jay Abraham: The one that I’m probably more – I mean, the triangulation has to do with an intangible way of doing business to barter. Its really cool, but it’s probably more complex than most people would think.
If I’m thinking the right thing, I think you’ll get a kick out of this. So, I know a lot of people in the very high technical world. I don’t purport to have their intellectual prowess, but I respect them. But everybody’s talking about The 10 X, moonshot, technology-driven, exponential growth that’s normally predicated on doing an integration of AR or VR. And what nobody tells you, and I’ve done enough research and talk to the experts and my premise was always what I’m about to say. But I verified it.
First of all, you got to figure out what your 10 X, moonshot, technology-based strategy is going to be. Then, you got to find the different experts to execute it. They may or may not work together in the industry or they may or may not choose the right AI’s or the right technology. Next is it’s going to take longer and cost more, like building your own house. You’re going to have to fund it. You either fund it out of cash flow or you fund it out of bringing on more debt or equity delusion, number one. Number two, when it finally gets done, it’s not going to probably execute very well in the beginning, so you’re gonna have to of course, correct. When it finally is correct, you’re gonna have to retrain or bring on new expertise that’s going to cost you a ton in lost time and in capital. But worse than that, now you got your 10 X, moonshot machine, but it’s only going to be worthwhile if you can get the value in the benefit expressed and embraced by the market, and that requires marketing expense, trade shows, PR. It’s like when everyone said “Oh, the internet! It’s going to cost nothing!”
John Lincoln: Yeah, not anymore.
Jay Abraham: But I believe, if you’re going to do it, while you’re doing it, before you do it, you have within your business maybe 50 to 100 different leverage points you can you can use to multiply yield with no extra cost, no more time. No more risk. No more expense. No more people. It’s just by learning higher-performing ways to use the time, the opportunity, the assets, the resources, the access, the capital, the human capital. And if you do that first, you’re going to free up the kind of money you’re going to need for this process, which is going to be far more painful, costly and low yielding in the beginning than you think. And that may sound jaundice, but I think I’m right.
John Lincoln: I like that. The example you just gave really speaks to me. At one point, not to be long-winded about it, I had built this entire business model for mind mapping. So say we take everything and we interview you for three days, and then we get all your information and then take that and build the subscription service so that, basically, artificial intelligence, you know, Q&A could answer anybody’s question that they would have for you. And it had a subscription model and a rev share all this stuff. It was all thought out. And come to find out, there’s companies with hundreds of millions of dollars that are investing in this same type of thing that are light years ahead. And whenever you’re going after kind of a new industry or something in technology like that, the funding and the years ahead that you need to be. It kind of makes me think a little bit of Qualcomm and 5G right now.
But so 100 X Internal Multiplier. It sounds a lot like a little bit of low hanging fruit in some ways and focusing on what works and being smart. So, just some quick information on that. Jay has all of these as courses on his website, by the way. So if anybody’s interested in purchasing those and learning about those you can go there and you can find out and get deeper dives. He’s not going to give us everything for free, unfortunately. So Jay, awesome stuff and I just have one or two other questions for you.
The main one I want to ask is, so you’ve been doing this for a while you’re still going. I see you out there at a lot of similar places that I am nowadays, which is so exciting to connect. What are you most excited about like in your life right now coming up? What’s coming down the pipe and what’s kind of keeping you motivated to continue this mission?
Jay Abraham: Well, I’ve always a default tendency to be hopelessly curious about all, either things I didn’t understand or things I understood that changed. So I had to relearn them and then because I’ve done things all over the world, you see all kinds of parallel universes of reality. I mean, we have, in this particular point, we have strained relationships with a number of different countries, but I’ve done tons of work in China, tons of work in Japan, tons of work in Malaysia, tons of work in Vietnam, tons of work in London, tons of work in Italy, little bit of work in Paris. I had a big client for three years in Mexico.
And you see that there are all these different realities and there are all these people. I think there are two kinds of businesses. There are businesses that are purposely designed, John, to be enduring, to be sustaining, to be ever-growing and be continuous value creators that have to be dynamically evolved, bonafide, course-corrected reset. And then there is, unfortunately, a dearth of promotions that are short-lived. But I think the people doing it are in it for a short run. And when that saturates, they’re going to go to the next thing. I have a lament, which I will share with you and I hope you agree, and I’m not going on the wrong side of your turf, but I have a great belief that the majority of experts selling one-trick pony tactics are dangerous to the long term health and wealth of the buyers, because they’re not really teaching you to build an integrated, strategic, multi-foundational business. They’re saying, okay, this strategy or this tactic is going to make you all this money.
And what typically happens, John, in the beginning, the first end do get an advantage. But the sellers of the tactic aren’t trying to sell a few first. They’re trying to sell 100,000 or 500,000, so it becomes marginalized. And at worst, it doesn’t work. At best, it becomes a standard everybody has to follow. You got to find the next strategy and the next strategy. And I think that’s a losing process. If that’s all you do, you have to build an enduring business founded on a lot of things, long term strategy business model, value creation, product service suites, all these kind of things, ideology and just a lot of things that I don’t think a lot of companies today are as focused on. I think it’s very dangerous.
John Lincoln: I’m interested. I do have a follow up there. So do you think, and this is just coming to me now, do you think the days of the cash cow are over? The cash cow product that just runs on its own and makes money, is that something that can exist because of how competitive things are and how fast things are moving?
Jay Abraham: I was watching a double presentation, one was Peter Diamandis at a very, very high level a hedge fund program that I went to, and had the same gentleman there, I’m trying to remember his name. I think he’s the guy that wrote a book on AI. And he was saying that IP isn’t even relevant anymore because you can buy it on the street in Shenzhen, China for $10, 20 bucks, something that will do the same job as creating your own proprietary solution for $500,000. So I think it’s going to require constant ability to be very fluid in your ability to keep taking one – if its one product, it’s got to be something that so defendable, and I don’t think many products are defendable for three reasons.
One, they get knocked off. And two, there are so many different ways to, as I said, a problem or an opportunity may be singular. Let’s say you wanted to make more money. Well, you can start a part-time business, you can buy a franchise, you can get retrained, you can become a real estate investor, you can fund somebody else. There’s a lot of options and I think today, you’re going to have to be multifaceted and extremely agile, not just robust but agile entrepreneur.
And entrepreneurship is not about just selling. It’s about constant value creation. Constant provision of decisively, desirable and uniquely and comparable experiences, and it’s about products and services either performing or having enough static value that people really relish and revere them. And I think most people have to do a lot of what I call re-education because I don’t think those attributes and those skill sets are well understood. That’s my opinion.
John Lincoln: I absolutely agree. And I love the way you put it, and I just feel like in the modern-day climate, you move quickly or die. And it’s a huge competitive advantage for smaller companies and a threat to larger companies, but the larger companies have more sustainability and it seems to me that a lot of cultures are changing in that way so that they can stay kind of caught up to some of the innovations that are happening.
So Jay. Last question I have for you today. Where can people find out more about you? Where can people follow you online? Where’s the best place to check you?
Jay Abraham: We have a website, which is abraham.com. And John I realized long ago that because I’m a little bit heady prized for most people, and a lot of people who are small, upcoming entrepreneurs can’t afford me. So we give away 800 hours of content and thousands of pages of material. And every time I do a keynote, they’re always different. A lot of people will never share their keynote because they only have one or two, but we never do the same. So we have 20 or 30 keynotes. And we have four books and we don’t even ask right now for an opt-in. And believe it or not, it doesn’t sell anything which is probably stupid. But we have that, we have a really cool documentary on me, which is pretty compelling with Tony and Damon John and Ramit Sethi and Dave Asprey.
And then we have products and programs, and if anybody’s large enough and has enough moving parts and a real business, I’m always interested in looking at it to see if I can add enough value that it merits some kind of a longer-term private advisory and sort of an association. I do what I call masterful collaborative, long term thinking, which is different than just mere consulting and it’s different than mentoring. It’s very integrated, but I’m always interested. But I hope I gave enough value today. But, anything anybody wants, they can get most everything gratis without even having to opt-in if they just go to abraham.com. And we have a hilarious subsite called 50 shades of J. And it’s pretty funny. It’s just a spectrum of materials resources. But I hope this has been good for you.
John Lincoln: This has been awesome. And everybody, go to abraham.com before Jay starts charging you for all that stuff or throwing up an email capture because it’ll probably happen someday.
But anyways, so thank you so much. Thanks for dropping some knowledge with us today and we’ll talk to you soon. Thanks, Jay.
John Lincoln: My pleasure. Thank you for the privilege. I appreciate it.
