Jay Abraham, the 21.7 billion man has a proven business leader, a top executive coach, and one of the highest paid marketing consultants in the world. As founder and c e o of the Abraham Group, Jay has spent his entire career solving complex problems and fixing underperforming businesses. He has significantly increased the bottom lines of over 10,000 clients in more than 8,000 industries and sub industries worldwide.
Jay has dealt with virtually every type of business scenario and issue and solved almost every type of business. Question, challenge, and opportunity. Jay, it’s an absolute honor. Welcome to the Run G P G Podcast. Thank you very much, David, and you said something already that I want to make a note of. It is a pleasure, privilege to be here and, and while your, listeners don’t know this, you and I have been talking offline and you’re fascinating and a very deep thinker and I’m actually already enormously impressed with your mind and, really interesting slant on your market in the world.
So this is gonna be interesting. I’m. Thanks for those words, Jay. But this is not about me. This is about Jay Abraham. and, and as I was telling you before, you know, being excited to have you on the show for more than a minute, you know, I was telling Brian there, you’re obviously a marketing and branding goat, as we say, the goat, you know, greatest of all time.
Your body of work is beyond impressive. You’re a thought leader. You have a standalone pedigree of working and mentoring, some of the most successful business builders and entrepreneurs on the planet. just to name a few, you know, you’ve worked with people like Tony Robbins, Damon John, Brian Tracy, Stephen Covey, many more, not to mention the many companies and, and brands you’ve consulted for.
We were talking about that off camera, right? So, you know, the question is, where do you start a conversation with someone like Jay Abraham? And I wanted to begin by just getting a little context, you know, for what made you the top executive coach that you are and one of the highest paid marketing consultants on the, on the planet really.
Where did the entrepreneurial journey begin for your, your marketing, journey begin and how did you become, as we say, mentor to the mentors? Maybe a brief autobiography on what got you to this point, Jerry. It’s, there was a movie The Accidental Tourist many years ago, and I would call myself the accidental marketing expert.
I got married David the first time, and I’ve been married, not saying this with pride, but more than one time when I was 18, I had the needs. I had two kids, the needs of, somebody 40 when I was 20. But the world didn’t care. I had no formal education, still don’t. And, the only people that would give me opportunity were very impressive, but very brilliantly crazy, as opposed to stupidly crazy entrepreneurs who wouldn’t give me a salary, but they would give me participation and results.
Sort of, you, you know, you eat what you kill. And when you only eat, you only eat. When you earn, you figure out what works and what doesn’t and what works better. But concurrently, because I was never paid for time, I had no obligatory responsibility to be anywhere from eight to five. Cuz they didn’t care.
They just said, okay, you make something happen, you get a piece, you don’t, you don’t. So I was always doing 5, 6, 7 things concurrently to pay the rent. And after about 10 different activities doing it for 10 different entrepreneurs, of which fortuitously they were almost all men and women who had a pension, David, for either bringing more value to, a market that they felt was underserved or filling a void that they felt, was not being addressed.
And I didn’t realize it at the time, but after doing about 10 industries, I always jumped not from the same industry, accidental, but fortuitously I realized. Very profoundly. And it was, it was life altering for me that people in one industry don’t have a clue how people in other industries think, act, transact, strategize, business model, distribution, channels, lead generation, conversion selling.
And I was able, very much like the one-eyed man in the land of the blind to take relatively common approaches from multiple industries, integrate them, combine them, turn them into hybrids, and introduce them to industries where everybody was fundamentally following the herd. And it was very exciting and I was very well, rewarded, but it was really almost, irony because I was just taking very common things that nobody knew in their industry and giving them advantage, ethical advantage, but very powerful advantage.
And then as that happened, a big shift happened. I got bored. And decided to play around with training people. And we were very successful at it because I had helped all these influencers. Tony Success Magazine, newsletters, entrepreneur magazine, make a lot of money. And so they were very willing to endorse me at a, a level of accolade that most people would not give to somebody else.
So they were able to say that I was, I’m not gonna say superhuman, but very gifted, which I hope is a true statement. And we started getting thousands and thousands of people paying 5,000, 15,000. This is back 30 years ago when it was a lot of money. And I got bored teaching my methodology. So I started doing what I called fractal training.
You’re asking what got me here. I’m almost done. But this fractal training was. Every time I would teach a concept, I would then make everybody in the groups who were at tables discuss an application that each company would do or each participant vote on the best one, and then come to the mic and share it.
So I was learning how they would interpret and then I became hopelessly curious and I spent years just interviewing people and asking, Socratic questions and trying to understand anything and everything I didn’t know about didn’t really matter cuz I had this curiosity. And the combination, has given me a very unique dis, I guess, ability.
I was talking David, and then I’ll shut up to some, a very prominent person, a couple of. Days ago, and we talked about the profound difference between expert knowledge and tacit knowledge. Expert knowledge, you can teach very easily. Tacit knowledge is the integrated combination of all the empirical real world experiences distilled, put together process through your intuition, your critical thinking, your your ability to see pattern recognition and put it all together.
And it’s a very unique, I probably gave you more answer than you want, but that’s the short but protracted thing or, or, or process that brought me to this point where we’re talking. Well, you did a great job. You know, how do you condense, you know, a lifetime of branding and marketing into, a brief description.
Thank you for giving us some background and context. We needed that, Jay. and you touched on it, you know, you know, early in your career you did work with a few household names and you, you mentioned Entrepreneur magazine, right? When no one knew what that word even meant, right? Yeah. You had to correct me if I’m wrong, but you had to send out promotions and letters with the Webster’s dictionary definition and explanation along with phonetic, pronunciation of the words fact.
You nobody had even knew how to pronounce the word when. Isn’t that interesting? So the question is, what’s the j Abraham definition of an entrepreneur? My definition is a man or a woman who seeks to add unique and distinctive value. To a market that is not being realized by anyone else There, there’s a really interesting, and, and I’m gonna paraphrase it, David, but it’s interesting.
Peter Drucker, who of a lot of entrepreneurs wouldn’t have, and young ones wouldn’t be aware of him, but he was, he’s deceased now, but he was one of the seminal management, thinkers of all time. And he was very profound man. And he had a very interesting, differentiation between what he called a proprietor and an entrepreneur.
And his analogy was very interesting. So he said that, you know, start with, think about a deli, a delicate in your neighborhood. A proprietor is somebody who opens a deli in an area where maybe there’s a lot of other food stores. So they’re trying to capitalize on the, they, they’re trying to suck oxygen opportunistically just out of the commerce that’s going on.
It’s a clean facility. It has reasonably attractive people working there. They are polite. The tables are clean. The, the counters are nice, you know, they’ve got, you know, meat and sandwiches and breads and cheeses in it. And they’re cordial and they are respectful. Then he said, an entrepreneur starts out purposely thinking about what is this experience going to be like and how am I going to make it more profoundly beneficial in terms of not just.
The palette, but the senses, the experience, the joy, therapeutic benefit that this hour or so they spend, if they’re gonna sit there or this sandwich that they’re going to go out and take back. And, and how do I make the experience so different? So they, they think about what it looks like before you even come in.
Maybe they pump the odors out of these wonderful fresh breads and cheeses and meats. They, they don’t use, they pay extra for this, for a higher quality. It looks fabulous the way they purposely strategically. Stack it. They, their breads are not stupid white bread that’s cheap and tasteless. They go out of their way to either bake or buy, artisan breads.
They work on names for their sandwiches that are memorable and almost laughable. But just people, you know, talk about, they make sure that they have proprietary, whether it’s mustard or, or mayonnaise or things like that. They have signature things. You memorize. The people have certain memorable phrases.
They use the outfits they use things they do and you, and it’s an experiential reprieve from the insanity of day-to-day. And they set out purposely trying to create that dynamic. I, I dunno if that’s simplistic enough to make the differential, but. What he said the difference was. What an incredible illustration.
I love that. And thank you for unpacking that. So here’s the question, Jay. why and when do people, companies, and brands come to you? people come, it’s, I’ll tell you something ironic and it’s always saddened me. We are perhaps on the precipice of a tumultuous time in our economy. Nobody knows whether it’ll be light, medi you know, horrific.
People come to. When they get stuck, stalled, stagnant, suffocate. The ironic thing is when things are going well, nobody gives us fundamentally the time of the day, which is ironic cuz that’s the time. You know, the adage is you fix the roof before, you know, while the sun shines, before it rains or sleets.
But most people are arrogant, no disrespect, cocky and, and, and overly confident. And they don’t realize that when things are going great is the time to experiment, to, to leverage, to, you know, to, you know, to really develop breakthrough thinking when you have plenty of time, cash flow and, wiggle room.
Because if you’re trying to engineer breakthroughs, you know, most of the experiments, if you do it right, won’t work. But you’re not looking for the losers. You’re looking for the one in X that explosively could grow. And people don’t realize that If you really wanna engineer masterful growth, It’s very interesting.
I’m getting on a little tangent, but you can hit on this after I’m done. It’s really, it needs to be an integration of two things, David, optimization and innovation, and the two are polar opposites. Optimization is about taking everything you’re doing and making it do better. Getting more yield from time, effort, action, investment people access to the market leads that don’t buy, or getting more yield out of the leads, getting more yield outta buyers, inactive buyers, distribution channels, salespeople.
Innovation is making all that stuff obsolete. Bridging the two is a very tricky, activity. So back at the ranch, they come to me Now when things stall stagnate, when they get stuck, then they get scared and unfortunately we thrive in a bad market and we sort of. We operate in a more neutral time when things are very, very good and it shouldn’t be that way, but, human beings are curative.
They’re not really preventative. Yeah, it’s interesting, Jay, because you, when you talk about those two being polar opposites, they really are, you know, innovation is not trackable at the beginning and that’s why people shy away from it, because they don’t have the numbers, right. The other part of it is trackable.
We know what the ROI is on certain things because we’ve implemented it and it’s running. Innovation is tough sometimes. It’s a tough for people to change. Giving a really interesting, mind blow, the consensus is that innovation is tied to technology and it certainly can be, but it need not be all. It means to me at least, David is the ability to bring greater benefit, value, advantage, protection, enhancement experience to, to a market.
That they recognize and value above and beyond the alternative. It can be doubling your guarantee. It can be 24 hour technology or service support. It can be a bonus nobody else gives you. It can be, you know, a distinction, your V I p, I mean, that is innovation does not have to be technologically driven.
Although today it’s been very focused on that and it certainly should be an integrative part, but it need not be that to be innovative. I, I couldn’t agree more, you know, which is great because I do wanna talk about marketing specifically for a few minutes because I think it’ll be valuable to break down, you know, some of the marketing concepts and strategies that you teach and talk about, especially as we head into an uncertain year for a lot of companies, sales professionals and, and service industries.
Because as we were talking about off camera, regardless of what the economy does or what your company sells or provides, you know, much if not all of what you teach and talk about is universal and unchanging because you speak to human behavior and the shopping behavior of consumers. So, we talked at length about this, and I love the topic of usps, unique selling propositions, and I wanted to jump right into that because, you know, our company was founded on usps.
We’re obsessive about using them in our marketing and branding. Especially in an industry like ours, which is real estate, can you touch on the importance of articulating and integrating your unique selling proposition or propositions in everything you do as a company or service, especially for, you know, someone in an industry like real estate.
So let me start with a fast, I’m gonna come at it in a way you probably will not expect. In the world of healing. There are wonder drugs and wonder ingredients. Penicillin was a wonder drug, aspirin, in many respects in the marketing world, the wonder concept is what’s called reason why. If you understand it, David, every decision people make, whether they they understand it consciously or subconsciously, is predicated on two bifurcated elements of the concept of reason why.
One is logical and one is in motion. The question that is non-verbal is, why should I buy from you? Respond to you, read your ad, anything, and if you don’t have a clear cut, compelling, resonating, and impactful reason why, then you are at a very, very serious disadvantage. And throughout history, the winners knew how to articulate their advantage.
And the advantage doesn’t matter whether you’re selling low end, high, end, large. And that u s P cannot be superficial. You have to live it. It has to be an integral part of your belief system. Your passion, your purpose, your your, your drive. And you know, we taught years ago, cuz you may or may not be as familiar with my work on, the strategy of preeminence.
But it’s got, it’s about how to elevate your company, your brand, product, service people into the role of the only viable solution. The only choice somebody can make. And it’s got a lot of elements that can take three hours to explain. But one of ’em is you shift your allegiance, you stop falling in love with your company, being the fastest growing are the most respected.
You stop falling in love with your industry and you move and fall in love with the clientele you serve. And you live with an awareness of your product or service or people deployed in their life. And it’s not static like you’re in that real estate business. Well, you don’t think, okay, I’m gonna sell you a house.
You think about what happens the rest of their life with that house. How you’re going to either, if it’s a a, a family starting out, how you have just. Solidify and assure a happier, safer, more successful life for this whole family. The husband will have more joy when he comes home. More satisfaction of what he’s created.
The, the, the kids will be in a better, environment with more successful, and, and this, I mean, the, the property will appreciate, they’re gonna have more joy at night. And you think way beyond the static transaction? I dunno if I’m giving you more than you wanna know. No, this is exactly, it’s, it’s benefits, not features.
Yeah. And most people don’t understand that all a feature is, if you think about it, most people are fixated. I mean, there’s some real irony in life. and this is, you’re not gonna ask this, but I’ll preempt you in an a, d d rogue moment. So most people, David, don’t understand your goal in life is you wanna make irresistible propositions.
Un irresistible offers unbeatable propositions. And reeled and maintain and achieve absolute ethical advantage. And the reason why is almost laughable. What is the opposite of an irresistible offer or an unbeatable proposition or absolute advantage? It’s irresistible offer, a beatable proposition and total disadvantage.
And people don’t understand. It’s very much like, like quantum physics. You expand or you contract. There’s no such thing as stasis. Really, it doesn’t stay here. Listen, hearing that, and I hope everybody’s paying attention, to hear the breakdown of unique selling propositions from the godfather of usps, Jay Abraham himself.
hey, David, let me interrupt you, please. Respectfully. Let me give you a couple of examples so it’s so blatantly clear. Okay. When FedEx came into the market, they redefined the whole business and they said when it absolutely, positively has to be there by 10 o’clock or earlier tomorrow, FedEx. Pretty simple.
When Domino’s Pizza first yes, came into the market, it said, yes, hot, fresh, delicious, pizza delivered to your door in 30 minutes or less. Or it’s your street dominoes. When, when Ava’s first came out, they said, we’re number two. We have to be more, do more, serve more, or we won’t stay in business. And when, Nordstroms, which may or may not be there, it’s a big, department store first came in.
They said, if you’re dissatisfied with any merchandise, should buy for any reason, any time you can have a refund, a replacement, or a credit, no questions asked. This was long ago, and that’s the essence of A U S P when I started my proposition. I have to dust it off cuz I haven’t used it for years. Was. I find hidden assets, overlooked opportunities, underperforming revenue activities, undervalued, utilized resources, and I convert them to newfound windfall profits and then convert those to ongoing, recurring, ever compounding streams of increased profit, all for no investment or.
Listen, I, I, I’m glad you brought up those examples. I, I use the Dominoes Pizza one a lot because I, it was a fantastic, example of a unique selling proposition. and then, you know, it, again, universal concepts. You can take something like delivered in 30 minutes or it’s free. I know why I’m calling Dominoes, right?
Because I’m gonna get a fresh pizza and it’s gonna be here in 30 minutes, or I don’t pay for it. Right. that’s why I’m picking up the phone. That’s what the risk reversal is too, right? If I, if I pick up the phone and call Dominoes. so that was really good. So it’s like, you know, in real estate we have the guaranteed sale program.
You’re home sold the next number of days, or we buy it, right? Similar type of offer. That’s a universal concept. Geico, 15 minutes could save you 15% on your insurance, right? That’s a great one. Yeah, it’s a good one because, you know, I know why I’m picking up the phone to call, like, let’s say a company like not a Geico commercial, but calling Geico because I know that I’m.
What to expect. I’m gonna spend 15 minutes on the phone, but the payoff is 15% savings. Right? So the concepts and, and the articulation of A U S P is universal regardless of the industry. You can take something like that and plunk it down and whatever business or service industry you’re in, I think it’s fantastic discussion.
I’m really glad we broke that down. And, and we did touch on it. We, you know, we were talking about the lifetime value of a client and referrals. I think it’s really important to touch on that. Why is it important to zoom out and think about the lifetime value of client? And to that end, why is it important to communicate frequently with existing clients, past clients based on the concept of knowing what the lifetime value of a client is in your business?
If you say, okay, I’m a professional in real estate, and then you look at your industry and you say, where’s the real opportunity in real estate? It comes from referrals and repeat. Right? Okay. How do you get referrals and repeat? Well, the ludicrous, if you don’t mind me saying it, assumption is you do a good job and they remember you.
The truth is you have to stay in their mind meaningfully, and that’s not just sending a calendar, but here’s the irony. People will, they, they don’t look at acquisition costs. What it costs you to get a lead and, and what it costs you to convert x leads to a transaction could be thousands of dollars, right?
The sale made you multiple of 10 times that or whatever, 20 times that, or five times that. But nobody will understand that The opportunity begins. We, we talked offline about. People think that it stops the, like, first mile, last mile. It’s not true. That’s the beginning, not the end. David, does that make sense or is it confusing?
Listen, Jay, I, you know, I don’t wanna be too, flip, I like, I don’t wanna be too presumptuous about this, but it’s like we have the same brain, and I’ll tell you why. , I’ll tell you why. we do a commi commission workshop with the agents nationally, and one of the things we talk about when it comes to the lifetime value of a client, is the cost to acquire.
Now, a lot of people don’t know this and people listening. If you, if you’re in the real estate industry, which a lot of our listeners and subscribers are, the lifetime value of a client is actually eight transactions, okay? On average, they’ve done studies on this. It’s about eight transactions now, that’s if you nurture, your leads properly, you stay in front, in front of them meaningfully, as you said.
Okay? So if the average commission, I use a round number. 10 K, let’s say just on average if that, if the lifetime value of a client is 80 K and you’re worried about an upfront referral of 25% and cost to acquired its pennies considering the the lifetime value. Here’s what people don’t realize. If you said, well, I can’t afford it, which is ludicrous, if you could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you will get at least half of that, you could go to an investor and say, Hey, will you fund $80 a year for me for half of the of the 80,000 future money I’ll get?
And nobody in the right mind who has any kind of of speculative nature would say, no, I would do that, wouldn’t. I, it’s, listen again, Jay. We need people to zoom out and look at this from, you know, the perspective of the lifetime value, not chasing the carrot and the today’s sale. So, so let me shock you because this is probably, you know, unfortunately I’m a mad scientist.
You may or may not know this, but over my career, and this is clinical, it’s not arrogant. We’ve created 90 separate categories of upside, performance enhancement that most of ’em are devoid of, much of any investment or risk. They’re just making what you do perform better. And one of the things I was massively excited about a couple years ago, and I found that people, for whatever reason don’t really bite into this, is that most people who generate a huge amount of their income from referrals or word of mouth don’t even have one formalized systematized.
Continuously adhered to and strategically executed referral generating process that they use other than saying, Hey, you know, I’ll give you a gift card or, or thank you if you know anybody. And it’s so crass and awkward. It makes a referral generated buyer. They’re loyal, they buy faster, they negotiate less, they’re more enjoyable, they’re more profitable.
We have identified, cuz I’ve worked in a thousand industries, not businesses, over my rather long and, and worldwide career, we’ve identified over a hundred and twenty five one two five referral generating system strategies. That different types of industries use to drive a huge portion of their business even to real estate agents.
I’ve explained that and I’ve given them different examples in long sessions I’ve done, and almost nobody does it. They just go right back, the status quo thinking. And I wanna almost, I can’t decide whether cuz there’s a fine line in da David between pathos and humor and I, I can never decide whether to cry or laugh because they make it so much harder.
You know how Tony Robbins does and, and he’s a colleague of mine and I do things, personally with Tony once a year and it’s fun. But you know how he teaches the firewall? Mm-hmm. I wanted, when I used to do seminars, and this is not a joke cuz it’s a metaphoric. I wanted to do the jello walk to prove that it’s not that hard.
Did did you ever do it? No, but I always thought metaphorically it would be memorable. Yes, it would be. Yeah, be Fanta. Well, I, I think you should do that the next time you. Yeah, well, I mean, I don’t do many seminars anymore. I do, some keynotes and some stuff, but I mean it, that was a different time in my life when I was, when I did massive seminars on a worldwide basis.
It’s been a long time, but anyhow, hopefully I’m giving you mostly, all right, listen. You, you’re touching on something that we, we, you know, we’ve been hammering into sales professionals is the lowest hanging fruit is repeat and referral business. It’s the low, it’s literally you can, you know, double your production seemingly overnight.
If you just take advantage of that, it’s not that hard to leverage the business you already have. Right. So I, I think it’s a really important discussion. I think people need to think more about that. And I’m glad that you broke that down. You know, coming from you, hopefully it, you know, encourages people to actually take advantage of that.
Now, one of the other things we talked about, you know, branding is the other part of that. So there’s marketing and branding. we talked about mastering direct response marketing. You’ve done that. It’s typically unbranded. However, I, I think that the really skilled companies have taken USPS and integrated it into the branding as we talked about.
So in your words, What is branding, or how would you define the word brand? And what should the process of branding or personal branding look like? Like I guess, you know, where should a company or individual start, or what should they be thinking about when it comes to branding? Well, you gotta stand out in a differentiator that resonates with your market.
And most people don’t get that. And we were talking, you and I, and we said, we think people think that their U s P is sticking their face on a grocery cart, or, you know, sending out a calendar or a notepad or, you know, being one of a number of people sending you what the lo you know, what the, you know, the average sales are last quarter or something.
And that that’s gonna make you stand out as somebody deserving and chewable as the go-to source. And it’s really almost, as I said, fine line between pathos. It’s either pathetic or it’s hilarious. Which one is it? Oh, man, it, it, it’s, you know, keep your market stats and your gift cards. No one’s, you know, no one’s, you know, using your services because of that.
Again, Jay, it’s like, you’re, you’re taking the words outta my mouth. I, I love it.
You, you know, one of the other things you’ve talked about, you know, when I was preparing for this, I’ve heard you talk about, partnerships and how sometimes they perform better for individuals or companies looking for a bigger market share. Can you tell us why someone might look at exploring the possibility of partnerships when they’re going to market?
Well, let me put it in very graphic imagery. I have generated billions with a B of dollars. Of revenue for clients and myself by opting not to go to the outside market and spend a fortune trying to build what we call outer peripheral trust and take all the efforts to migrate that over a lot of funnel elements to get to committed trust, which even isn’t that certain, cuz people will commit when they’re not really that confident because of, you know, of extenuating or existence circumstances.
But when you go to somebody who has hard won over time, the trust, the credibility with their audience and has delivered meaningfully on whatever they’ve done. And if the audience profile is the same as yours, you can shorten the timeline and the sales cycle by an unimaginable amount by getting them to.
Endorse you promote, you, make you their rec recommended provider, co-brand with you, whatever legally you need to do in a world where you have, regulatory constraints. And maybe you have to do things differently. And I’m not gonna get into all the options, but there’s always ethical and legal waste to do it.
But give you a simple example. When I was in the seminar business, which I was in for not a long time, three or four years, we did, we did, and this is back, 30 years ago, we did $250 million, two, five oh oh oh, oh, oh oh ohs or another oh oh oh. I mean a lot of volume. And I spent out of pocket upfront a total of 300.
The rest was on performance because Tony Robbins endorsed me. Success Magazine endorsed me. entrepreneur endorsed me. The in-flight magazines when they used to have them endorsed me. 25 newsletters endorsed me three, big seminar companies that weren’t competitive endorsed me cuz I’d helped them all and made him millions and millions of dollars.
And I was able to shortcut. If you think about it, I look at everything as this, in this context of an investor. If a bunch of influential people and an influencer is a relative term, if you’re a local real estate person, an influencer might be the nail salon. Doesn’t have to be the, you know, the number one person depends on the market you’re serving.
Could be a dentist, could be, you know, could be lots of different entities or individuals. But if you think about it, let’s take a bigger, let’s take a national influencer. He or she or that company might have spent years building their credibility, their brand. They might have a payroll of tens of millions of dollars or millions of dollars, thousands.
They have delivered value over a period of time. People have have dealt with them. In a trusting relationship, if you calculate the tangible and intangible dollars that represents, it might be millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions. And if you did three or four or five of those, you’re getting the leverage out of a million dollars, 10 million, a hundred million for nothing, but whatever backend meaning result based compensation you need to give.
And if you can’t pay in cash, you do some reciprocal. And that’s pretty profound. And there’s a lot, I mean, we, we’ve got, you know, I’ve done training programs on it, I’ve. A business we’re developing, they’re just structure, strategic alliances, joint venture relationships for people and recommended provider.
But most people don’t understand it. And it’s much different than an affiliate, a superficial affiliate type one time promotional launch. That’s the outer periphery we’re talking about. Well, let me give you the best example. It’s old, but it will show you how profound this can be, David. And again, I’m, I’m dating myself, which is okay.
So I got started long ago and I was very involved in the newsletter business when it first started long ago. And I was very involved in the gold brokerage business when it started. And that is because gold was illegal for many years in United States. And then it became re legalized in this the late seventies.
So I was involved in people with people selling gold bullon, like little and coins and newsletters, selling financial economic investment, philosophical, political health type information. When it first started, I had this gold company and we started out when everyone else was selling gold and everyone else was selling it in ads in the Wall Street Journal and Forbes in their local newspaper and spending a lot of money to get leads that they had to work very hard to convert because nobody knew who they were.
It was just some entity somewhere else on the phone and they were making money, but it was very costly. A lead was very costly, conversion was low, cost of sales was high, and I realized that the real audience that we wanted were the subscribers to the newsletters. They trusted these newsletters cuz they tended back then to be real business owners and invest investors who were tended to be more conservative and they were free market beliefs.
They had, you know, like Austrian economics. It’s a, a belief system that I don’t wanna get into, but it’s a, it’s a, a distinction and they subscribed to all these newsletters. So instead of wasting all our money on, on ads that were very marginal, I went to all these newsletters and we structured deals where, number one, we became the recommended gold source provider.
Every time they got a new, new, subscriber, we provided them with materials they would include in their welcome package. That was all about investing in what’s called hard assets, gold, silver, rare coins. We also, got into, gold stocks. We then every quarter we, we funded a quarterly special edition of the newsletter.
That was the outlook for hard assets. That’s the same thing. And we would pay a very qualitative and recognized, either, a columnist or an author or an icon to, to author this, this special edition. And it would be very balanced and very authentic. We would also agree to underwrite, quarterly and on regional basises, live seminars that we would fund a hundred percent.
We would pay for an icon to be a keynote. Our president would speak and the, the head of the newsletter, and we would give the newsletter all the profit from the activity above cost because we wanted the audience. When newsletter, in the newsletter business, David, the, the normality is they will mail their, this is, this is before the internet.
They would mail sales letters offering the subscription, and it would run from a hundred to $500 a year for a subscriber. And they would keep mailing until they, they, they, they, they, they fell below, breakeven up to breakeven. They would keep doing it and breakeven to them would mean one or two things. It would either be with or without the cost of fulfilling the newsletter included.
Because back then I’m giving you more data than you want. But it’s an interesting story. It was only about $6 a year because there were special mailing rates to send 12 issues. So it was very nominal and the biggest. Cost was the marketing, the, the, the renting of a list, the printing of a letter, the mailing of a letter, the postage, et cetera.
So when a newsletter stopped breaking even our gold company would come in and I would take their, their sales letter. I would make it stronger, better headline, better risk reversal, better bonus, better positioning, and we would fund it to reactivate generating subscribers for them. Because we had, as part of our deal that we got joint tenancy of all the database.
Today, if it’s an email list, you need permission, but you didn’t if it was a mailing list. So we would build our own leads when it stopped working as. Newsletter promotion. We would take the copy and I would modify it for the gold company because most newsletter promotions are based on a bonus, a special report identifying the 30 best stocks to buy or the mega trends or whatever.
We would take that and turn it into a lead generator for our gold business because that was normally more exciting than just trying to run an ad saying, do you want to know about gold? The point I’m making, it was very integrated, strategic. Most people are short-term, superficially tactical, and there’s a big difference.
I hope that wasn’t, yeah, no, and I, I do want to get into that specifically. You, you touched on it, you know, when, when we’re talking about partnerships and you’re talking about endorsements. When I was preparing for this interview, you tell a really interesting story about Baron Rothchild on the floor of the stock exchange.
Do you mind, relating that story in the lesson? It teaches when it comes to endorsements and partnerships, it was one of the stories that one of my mentors told me, and the story goes that somebody came up to Baron Rothchild and wanted to borrow back then a hundred thousand dollars. And he said, I won’t lend you a penny, but I’ll do something infinitely more valuable.
I will walk back and forth with you two times across the stock exchange floor with my arm, around your shoulder. When I am done. Everyone in the exchange will loan you all the money you want because of the relationship of the implicit. Trust that occurred by him lending his implied endorsement. And if it’s an explicit endorsement, it’s much stronger.
How powerful is that? I love that story. You know, it’s perception, right? Marketing, and sales is all about perception as well. what a powerful lesson that story teaches. So I love your breakdown of that. you did touch on the unlimited checkbook, the unlimited business checkbook. you know, I was telling you we just had Grant Cardone on the show, and he was, he just filmed, a series on discovery channel called, undercover Billionaire, and he shattered the myth of the fact that you need money to make money.
your unlimited business checkbook is a variation of that. You don’t actually need money to make money. what is it that you do need, or what is the unlimited business check? Well, here’s, here’s, let me give you the, the concept in a nutshell with an, with a case study that will blow people’s mind to demonstrate.
So people think they are resource impaired cuz they don’t have enough capital or they don’t have a, enough product or they can’t develop any, or they can’t hire top marketers or digital marketers or technology or whatever. And that’s totally, absolutely ludicrous. That is not true. Whatever problem you think you have, it almost always David, is the solution to somebody’s bigger problem or untapped opportunity that the other side doesn’t even know they have.
If you can basically identify who they are generically and then specifically and what it is, and articulate your solution, you can own the world. Let me give you the simplest example. when I was. About your age. I used to travel the world. We did seminars all over China and Singapore and Malaysian, Vietnam, and, and Thailand and Bali and London and everywhere.
And one time when I was in China, I did a seminar and at the end we would do q and a with translation. And a young man came up to the microphone and very heartfelt, said, what do you do if your business is too small and the bank won’t lend you money to grow? And I said, okay, tell me more. And he said, we are a small local motorcycle manufacturer now only in China where you maybe have a hundred million populous.
Would you be a local motorcycle manufacturer? And he said, if I could get money, I would. I would go all over Asia. I would, I would set up a manufacturing, plant. I would open offices, I would hire salespeople. I would, I would recruit dealers. And we’d build dealers in 10 or 12 countries. And I was looking at him, said, okay, well I don’t understand.
What’s the problem? And he was very annoyed. He goes, I just told you they won’t lend you money. I said, you don’t need money. All you have to do is figure out who your problem is, the solution for go all over Asia, take a road trip, find somebody who’s very significant in a non-competitive, complimentary type of a business who already has huge factory that’s being underutilized, has offices, has salespeople, has dealers, and partner with them.
It took me, what, two minutes to explain that. So 15 months later, I was back doing another seminar. This was in. The city of Shenzhen, which is their equivalent of Silicon Valley in China. And the same young man comes up to the mic and, and now he looks like the Cheshire cat. He’s smiling and ever vesting and happy, and he is just so you know, very, very, very, exhilarated.
And he said, I did what you said. And I, I spend my whole life, David, answering question, solving problems, untangling Gordian knots. I had no even memory. And I said, well, what did I say? He told me, I said, what did you do? He said exactly what he said. I went all over Asia. When I got to Gu lump power, which is in Malaysia, the capital of Malaysia, I found Asia’s largest lawnmower manufacturer.
They had a massive factory. They were underutilizing in the second shift. They had offices in 10 countries. They had sales forces, they had thousands of dealers. We made a deal where they provided manufacturing people. Everything. I just had to bring the tool and dyes. And if you don’t know what those are, those are the, the forms you use to create the products or the assemblies that make a product that you sell.
I had to guide them and train them on how to manufacture. I had to teach the salespeople how to sell to the, to the dealers. He said, in our first full year together, we both made 15 million in profit by just leveraging off of that, that distribution relationship. I believe that anybody that wants has no problem growing.
You don’t need money, you don’t need, I mean, any resource someone else has, I mean, you could say, well, I can’t afford a, a, a, a consultant because they’re gonna want five or 10 or $20,000 a month. My answer is, if you can show that consultant, that expert, a provable way, that if they provided their expertise to you, You would first of all implement it and if you implemented it, you could show them the, the profit it would make or the savings it would make.
And if you can show them that they can get a far greater percentage of that saving or profit well beyond what their fee would be, and you can prove with certainty you’ll do it. And they have certainty about the value. You can get experts all day long to do that. What an incredible breakdown. And again, you know, the value, in this episode, I hope everybody’s taking notes and paying close attention, cuz that is, that’s an incredible breakdown.
The unlimited business checkbook. Now what’s interesting, Jay, is, you know, you’re, you’re not a marketer. You’re, you’re more than a marketer, you’re a strategist, right? You’re a strategist. And the question is, why is strategy more important than tactics or hustle even? Like, what’s the difference between being tactical and being a strategist?
can I answer with a story? Absolutely, yeah. Mike is the floor is yours, Jay . So I had one, one died. I had two friends many years ago who got really interested in an emerging, field, and it was simulated diamonds when they first came up with simulated diamonds were, which are called cubic zicon. Two of my friends, both at the same time, got interested in the area.
One of ’em was a very, very famous copywriter, but he was totally tactical. The other was a famous businessman who was not a good copywriter, but he was totally strategic. So they both decided to go into the market and the first one true story was the copywriter who was totally tactical, but a brilliant copywriter.
He came up with a name for a business called the Beverly Hills Diamond Company. He wrote a absolutely amazing ad selling a one carrot simulated diamond, called the Beverly Hills Diamond for $39 cuz it costs very little, but it was very beautiful loose stone. And he ran a full page ad in the Los Angeles Times that cost $25,000 on the front of us section back when newspapers were hot.
It’s an older story but it makes the point. And the $25,000 ad pulled about $45,000 of sales and after everything he made about seven grand and that wasn’t enough to rock his boat. So he sent out the product cuz he didn’t wanna, have to give refunds and he folded his tent and gave up, but he made seven grant tactical.
The other guy watched that and thought he’s missing the boat. He wrote an ad and he, he laughingly created a company he called Van PLIs and which was a laughable take on Van Clef and Relle and Tiffany’s. And he created the Van PLIs diamond. He wrote an ad that was nowhere as powerful as the good copywriter who was tactical.
And his ad sold a one carat loose stone for $39 and he spent a similar 25 grand. And instead of bringing in 43,000, he only brought a little bit more than his expenditure, maybe 30 or so. And after all expenses, refunds, credit cards, he, he lost about four grand. Now that story, if I stopped there, would say that the tactical person was much smarter, wouldn’t it?
Cuz he made four and the other lost. He made seven and the other lost four. So there’s an $11,000 swing. So one could, a could auger and say, wow, the tactical guy was the smart one. But the story doesn’t end there. The tactical guy, because he didn’t really see the value. He was a, a static thinker. He took his loose stone through it in a cheap corrugated little box with a little note saying, here’s your stone.
I hope you like it. and that was it. He sent it out a slow third class mail. It took forever to get there. The strategic guy who wasn’t as good, a copywriter who lost four grand, took his stone, put it in a beautiful, beautiful velvet pouch inside a simulated box that was made to look like wood inside a padded envelope with two documents, not a little piece of crap.
Uh no. The first document was a letter from him as the. President of Van Pless and ti and it said, I wanted to personally thank you for having enough blind faith to, take advantage of our one carrot loose, a stone offer and send your $39. What you’re going to find is, something much more magnificent than you even expect.
And before you take it out of the pouch, I wanted to, share with you that what you’re about to experience is a gemstone that is far more radiant, fiery, brilliant, and majestic than you can even imagine. It is going to be captivating, but there is one thing I need to alert you to. It might seem smaller than you imagined.
It is not because we, in any way, shape, or form took advantage of you. Rather, it’s because in order to get this fiery brilliance, Literally above and beyond that of a true diamond, we had to make it denser, means it’s heavier per weight. So one carrot in our, van p plus diamond is heavier than it, it’s more condensed.
And when people see how brilliant it is, they, they contact us typically and wanna know if we sell larger stones that they can take to their jeweler and set in rings and pendants and necklaces and earrings. And because we, we, we used to accommodate them and we’d watch them go to their local jeweler and pay a fortune for settings.
And sometimes, frankly, overpay, we decided because we are also manufacturing jewelers, that we would set some of our most, some of our most brilliant size stones, the 10 and the 20 and the 30 Kara in gorgeous earrings, necklaces, rings, Bendin. Bracelets and offer them to you. Preset at prices that we have seen are approximately 50% less than the local jeweler.
And what you will see in the other document I have sent is a mini catalog that shows you the items that we have ready for immediate shipment. If you like them and if you trust us to do that, I’d like to make you a, a proposition, I think you’ll find very, very appealing. Number one is if you would like to choose anything from this list or from this catalog and, and try it out.
We will not consider your purchase complete or binding on your part until you’ve had it for 60 days. You’ve, you’ve worn it, in enough places that you got just bedazzling comments from men and women alike of how brilliant and beautiful it looked. And secondly, you must take the, the item to your local reputable jeweler and ask him or her what they would charge to re replicate it in another, setting themselves.
And if their quote isn’t at least twice what we charge, we will not even begin to think we deserve to keep your money. So we will, we will exchange it for a refund right on the spot. No questions asked, no hard feelings either. And oh, by the way, to reward you for your faith in the first place. If you’d like to send back the one karat stone, we will give you twice what you paid in credit for anything else you buy.
And oh, by the way, we have incre included a prepaid return package you can use with your order now. One was tactical and made seven grand. The other was strategic. Initially operative word is initially lost four grand, but in the first year he made 25 million. That David, is the difference between being tactical and strategic, was that adequate?
Was that adequate? you know, Jay, only you could tell a story like that to get the point across. You know, nobody else would be able to answer that question in quite that way. So I really appreciate that breakdown. That was fantastic. I was paying close attention. you know, speaking of being tactical or strategic, what commonality do you see among the successful entrepreneurs and business builders you work with?
Is there one, seemingly, you know, singular trait? There, there’s, there’s a couple of categories of three Ps, but there’s, it’s. A sense of passion for not what, just what they’re doing, but who they’re doing it for a possibility. They see, they have a vision beyond whatever they’re at or whatever their industry is at, and they see the possibility.
It’s very real to them. you know, we teach preeminence and we teach it for many reasons. And one of it is that it’s liberating. It’s, it’s, it’s, intoxicating. It’s, it’s amazingly it elevate you to a, a strata in a competitive world where you’re, you, you’re, everything is a 3D movie and you can have the only pair of glasses.
And I see people, they’re not, they’re not, you know, there’s an adage, you, you know, you walk to the beat of a different drummer. They’re not even playing at the same level as, as the maddening crowd. They’re just way above it in how they see things, what they’re trying to do. They’re having a great time.
They’re advocates of their audience. They’re building something that is beyond making money. As somebody told me when I started, that you are rewarded in life and in business and direct proportion to the quantity, the quality, and the consistency of problems you solve and opportunities you make possible for others.
And they understand that at a very high level. People that are just trying to make money, a very self-limiting. It’s very self-limiting cuz they’re self-obsessed instead of externally focused. David. Yeah, like it’s incredible when you break down. you know, I love to ask that question among people who work with the best of the best right.
Mentor to the mentors, you know, what do you see? Yeah. There’s two other things that, and I’ve learned from, great mentors I’ve had. One is, is a really cool, and I use this all the time and people laugh, but it’s true. Hire the best and cry only once when you have to agree to pay them. Because the differential between greatness and mediocrity is, is exponential and performance and, and a value and yield.
And the other is literally be committed to always grow and develop your team, your infrastructure. Because the greatest undervalued asset you have is your people. Most people don’t understand it. Human beings have the capacity to achieve many times more in the course of a 40 or 50 or 30 hour week than most do, but it’s not their fault.
They don’t know how to optimize time, effort, collaboration, productivity, highest and best use. And if you don’t help them, then you cannot expect them to double or redouble their value to you. But if you’ve got a small business, all the more reason you’ve gotta really invest in growing and developing instead of squeezing everything out of the people that you work for.
You have to realize every one of those people have the same hope, streams, fears, challenges, you do. Just maybe some of the more micro, some more macro and, and if you understand that, Hitching their wagon to your star and you’re not really trying to help them shine, then it’s not only suboptimal and selfish, but you’re really losing out both sides.
You, they, they, nobody I did, I mean, I’ve done all kinds of fascinating explorations of performance over my life. I’m not into a good digital marketer, but I understand the human condition pretty damn well. And I did a lot of work a couple years ago on greatness. And my, my, perspective, David, was that every human being with the exceptions of acts of God, you know, where they’re maybe mentally impaired or, or, or come from a really bad environment, have inherently in their dna the desire to be.
Nobody who sells, wants to come into their office or business on a Monday morning and say to themselves, self, I’m gonna spend all day and achieve a fraction of what I can and be crappy at it. Nobody wants to be a bad entrepreneur. A, a, a, a crappy leader, a horrible marketer, a incompetent value creator.
Nobody wants to be a, a lousy father, mother, husband, wife, lover. And yet, the vast majority, I don’t know, 90 some percent, 95, 90 8% are mediocre. And I studied why. And there are about three or four key reasons, which I can share before we stop. If you want to know, or we can leave it as a cliffhanger, I would love for you to share them.
I’m, I’m loving this, so I, I’m, I’m all ears, is they don’t understand what greatness is supposed to look like. There may be in your life or in your business, eight or eight, nine categories of greatness. That you could manifest. And the first thing is figuring out what they are and they’ll differ from different people.
And we did, we did an analysis. I don’t remember Brian on the phone. Might, on the line might remember, but I broke it into eight or 10 categories, but I haven’t looked at it for a while. But you figure out what they are, first of all, and then most people don’t have a clue what greatness is supposed to feel like, express, like change in your brain, change outta your mind, your actions in any of these categories.
So you need to model people that have it, first of all. Then you’ve gotta see, okay, this is what it’s supposed to look like. If I’m gonna be a great manager, a great marketer, a great husband, a great lover, a great parent, then you gotta see where you are, as far as the gap. But you don’t stop there.
You see all these gaps because normally, There is what I call log jam effect. In other words, if there’s eight elements in your business or eight elements in your personal life, maybe it’s health, maybe it’s balance, maybe it’s passion, maybe it’s connection, maybe it’s, you know, anything. And that’s in personal and business.
It’s got all these different things. Your strategic ability or management ability, your value creation ability, your, all these abilities, and, and, and you figure out which one more than anything else is so out of sync that you gotta fix that first. So now you figure out what they are, what greatness looks like at the, and, and it doesn’t have to be the peak, but you model people in your life or that you’ve observed that manifests those different attributes.
And then you correlate it to where you are and you look at the gap. So now you know a little bit about what it’s supposed to look, feel, and be like. You know where you are, you’ve isolated the priorities. So now you know where you’re trying to get to, but you don’t know how to get there. So you gotta figure out what’s the safest way to do it.
Most people, sadly, when they can configure anything out, they’re so obsessed. They try to be a, an Olympic full vaulter, the first time and when it, when it set an Olympic record, but they have no strength, no proficiency, and they fall down and they get scared and then they retreat to status quo. And it’s very much like if you have children.
You told me you have a, a daughter or a son that just got married. I have seven kids. it’s when you have a little child and they learn to, they’re trying to learn to talk, walk, eat, poop, Ride a bike. They’re terrible. They’re terrible, and if they elect to their own devices, they would never grow. But you have to be their advocate.
They’re champion. You keep encouraging them. You stand ’em up, you put ’em on the toilet, you put the spoon in their mouth out of their eye, you pick up the bike that fell over. Well, you need somebody in your life to be your champion, your advocate. You don’t have to necessarily pay them all. You can pay.
You can pay a mentor, you can pay a coach, you can pay a colleague, but you can have somebody. But without that, you’ll never get even close to greatness. And greatness is a relative term. You don’t have to be Jeff Bezos or Warren Buffet or Elon Musk. You can be great relative to who and where you are in your life.
But the odds are that almost everyone is far from what their own greatness potential. Entitles them to, and I find it very tragic that most people accept a terrible, terrible, terrible set of lower achievements and, and, and mediocrity when so much more is possible for them.
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I, I love your breakdown of achieving greatness, you know, being a collaborative effort. I think you said hire the best and cry only once. Right. You know, the, the role of a leader or entrepreneur is to, play to people’s strengths. So I think that’s a, you know, incredible, takeaway. I love that. just a couple questions to wrap up because I, you know, again, I, I’ve really appreciated your time and I don’t wanna keep you too long.
But, who mentors the mentor, like you? You mentioned that you had mentors. Who did you learn the most from? Or what I, when I was young, they were all the, the great entrepreneurs that I lucked out who, who gave me, no security, but great opportunity and I was able to observe their focus on adding value, filling voids and their passion.
But then I was able, as I was very lucky, most people don’t know this, but besides a thousand industries, I’ve helped. Seriously about about 300 of the top A level, mostly business authors, experts, trainers, consultants. And none of them came to me for help with their methodology. They came for help to command more value, to charge more, to have the market see its superiority against alternatives.
But before, excuse me, I could ever help them. They had to give me a distilled short course perimeter. So I got this immersive compression understanding of a multitude of different methodologies, different ideologies, different philosophies, different technologies. And it’s we were talking earlier, I dunno if it was on camera or off, about, there’s two kinds of knowledge.
There’s expert knowledge, which can easily be taught. And then there’s tacit knowledge, which is the, the total integration culmination combination of all the real life experiences that you have encountered over a life or a career or both brought together that you access. And it has, it is, it is driven by, critical thinking, consequential thinking, strategic thinking, pattern recognition.
There’s nine levels of that. And it’s a, it’s a very interesting place cuz I have been very blessed in a very unique way, just being clinical to understand a lot of and, and I can teach a lot of it in the expert side, but I can’t teach the understanding that is experiential, intuitive. You know, consequential and things like that.
So it’s a very fascinating, I dunno if I over No, no, no. You, well, you’re, you’re touching on it. You can only learn that with experience. Right. And when you get long in the tooth, like we are Jay, when you get long in the tooth like you and I are right. That’s the only you learn with experience. And, and fortunately there is a, there’s a fallacy.
I’m gonna give you two fallacies before I stop that I find ironic. There are a lot of tacticians who are very successful today and they’re young and they’ve never really experienced a downward market. Nor have they really experienced the breadth of life and all the vagaries and the opportunities and the possibilities that a life in terms of business can throw at them.
And I think that they, they, they will be probably a little bit. humbled and also hardened. If they allow themselves to do this, I think it’s gonna be very interesting. Secondly, and totally related, but different I have, I challenge the concept of best practices. everyone thinks best practices, represent, you know, the mother load of, of performance enhancement.
But if you think about it, if all best practices are David, are the best practices from one or two related industries, and everyone is trying to learn them, what it really is is it becomes from best practice advantage to standard operating procedure, doesn’t it? So then you have to be the first to learn the next best and the next best.
I think that you want what I always taught, which is funnel vision instead of tunnel vision. The true breakthroughs in life do not usually come from inside. They come from outside. FedEx borrowed the, the, the, the hub and spoke check clearing, process that a federal reserve bank uses to make sure people don’t balance a check to create an overnight industry.
fiber optics that transformed telecommunication was discovered in aerospace and borrowed, Rogan came from, pimple medicine. Viagra was, heart medicine. The most successful baby buggy in the country borrowed the collapsible, wheel from an airplane. But the real breakthroughs really don’t come from inside an industry.
That’s why I try to get people to travel outside their industry for discovery and be curious, because that’s where you’re gonna gain the greatest advantage. I could not agree more. that’s kind of what we do as well. We go outside the industry and bring the principles back. So I I, I love your breakdown there.
Okay. Two, wrap up questions. these are fun ones, Jay. These are fun ones. Okay. If you could have dinner with any three people in history, pastor present, who would they be? And y wow. I’m obsessed with Socratic interviewing, so I would’ve liked to have met Socrates. I don’t know if, if he would’ve been a, a nice person, but I’m interested in Machiavelli.
Mm-hmm. and Da Vinci. Wow. That’s a Imagine that dinner table, Jay. So we got Socrates. We’ve got Machiavelli and we’ve got DaVinci. Yeah, I think that’d be interesting. That’d be a great, that’d be great. now, final question before we ask what your current projects are. What a lot of talk recently and you know, a lot of the, you know, I, I talked to very, a lot of very successful people about legacy.
When all is said and done, what does the Jay Abraham legacy look like? What do you want to be known for? Well, it’s interesting because I didn’t set out to do this, but I, you know, before I stop being really aggressively into training and seminars and traveling, we helped billion, we have billion, millions of people around the world.
We’ve done it everywhere. Japan, China, no, I think that I have helped a lot of people, not as many young ones, but a lot of people learn how to be preeminent, learn how to add more value, learn how to fall in love with their market, learn how to be greater entrepreneurs, learn how to gain greater joy out of the process and give greater joy through the process and make life a lot more purposeful.
I think I’ve taught people. Who have committed a life to a business or a career or a profession, how to get a lot more from it. Ethically, I think I have helped people. I’d like to hope be better human beings, be better fathers, mothers, husbands, wives. I don’t know if I help ’em be better lovers, but appreciate and, and I think that’s pretty cool.
If I had a dru, I haven’t really spent much time on younger people under perhaps 40. And I probably should do that in these, this part of my life. Cuz I think, you know, I’m not very good in digital marketing, but I have a lot of people who do digital marketing that come to me and they tolerate my, ineptitude.
Cuz if they can tell me what it’s supposed to do, I can give them ways to do it better or communicate it better. But they have to translate it to digital marketing ease cuz I don’t even turn my computer on most of the time other than something like this. But yeah, I mean, I think that I’d like to hope that my work carries on.
Jay Abarham Transcript
I think the laughable thing, and, and I’ll tell you this, which is funny, as I talk to you right now, I have 63 serious clients around the world. I’m a principal in seven different masterminds. One has 2000 members in Japan. Another one has 1,015 hundred in, Japan. Another one has a small group, but it’s expensive in France.
One is in Spain. three of them are dental, dental, and one is a hundred thousand dollars one with the number one guy in the world in Chinese energy. Really interesting guys. Tony’s, is Tony’s guy. He used to be Warner Earhart’s guy. He’s done a. Pro athletes and a lot of people who are young think that I have sort of disappeared off the earth and I’m an old calcified person.
Rocking on the steps. Knock it off Jay, knock it off. and, and, I’d like the ability to no, don’t mean that negative. I’d like the ability to reinvigorate people with an awareness that there are certain universal principles that are enduring, they’re immutable. They have to be altered, modified, interpreted, adapted, adopted, extrapolated differently for today.
But human beings are human beings. And if you understand with, with clarity the powerful drivers of the human condition, and you don’t try to game it, you try to. you know, to embrace it and to, contribute to it. You can own the world and I think that’s a good message that I hope I leave to the world, but, you know, we’ll see.
Well listen, Jay, you’ve been a huge influence on me. That’s a fact. I’m a student of all things Jay Abraham, personally. Okay, so what, final question here. What current projects do you have on the go or where do you want the people to go to learn more? We have a couple of things we’re doing. I’ve been through eight downturns, so we’re getting ready to teach people how to recess and proof a business.
Years ago, we sold a thousand dollars book on it and I’m, developing new methodology cuz I don’t think a lot of people have really been through a lot of downturns and there’s more opportu. , for prosperity and growth if you know what to do. Number two is I’m working on a really interesting book with a guy, you probably, maybe you don’t roll in Frazier and it’s all about the title of a book is Creating Business Wealth Without Risk.
And the subtitle is How to Earn the Income of a Lifetime Every Three Year, three Years. And the premise is why start a business from scratch or try to grow a typical business conventionally when starting a business from scratch has a one in 20, first year success rate, which is only 5% and a and a one in 10, 10% a five year.
In fact, you can acquire an underperforming business without using out-of-pocket your own money. There’s 200 ways to do it and then I’ve got 90 ways to blow up the profit. And then you flip it for a, a tremendous payday and then you rinse and repeat. That’s interesting cuz we’re doing it cuz we want deal flow.
I want participation. I’ve changed my model. We used to do just. Very large fee income, and now I’m looking constantly for interesting businesses with enough moving parts in their revenue system that I can leverage it up and participate. You know, we sometimes get a big fee, again, sometimes we waive the fee.
It depends on the deal, but I’m always looking for that. I’m working with a prominent, prominent executive coach who turned around Adidas. He’s doing, he’s doing the executives of Nike. He did the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange that. The head of the joint chiefs of staff and some very sophisticated people we’re working on teaching entrepreneurs serious ones, how to build legendary companies.
That’s interesting. And then we’re thinking about taking my body of work and creating tactical training, for example, three way to Grow business training, nine drivers of, of, geometric, excuse me, of exponential profit training. Power Pathon training. Joint venture training, because my work is so expansive and deep that it intimidates people.
And, we’re working on one more thing, which is interesting. There’s, there’s, a prominent person in the investment world named Anthony Scaramucci, and he and I have been working on a book that keeps changing. But originally it was going to be titled, the Alpha Life. And it was, the premise was to take.
Hedge fund ideology, which is asymmetric upside outside performance and de-risking the downside and overlaying those philosophies in every facet of your business and life. But in, in exploration of it, we realize that part of the, the premise is enjoying, like mad, this wonderful thing called life we’ve been given.
So the working title now is enjoy the process because we all know how it ends. . Oh my god, that’s a great title. and my God, Jay, working on a lot of things that are interesting and we also have one more, and it’s called the Promethean, c e o. And the concept is these are Promethean moments. If you understand Greek mythology, Prometheus was a titan that climbed up to Mount Olympics and stole fire from the gods and brought it down to the populace to change forever, humankind.
And we believe that these are Promethean moments. That entrepreneurs have the opportunity to tremendously capitalize on or mismanage, and without some guidance, you don’t know what to do. So that’s a lot of stuff I’m doing. Jay, you’re not slowing down at all. Well, I mean, that’s a lot. That’s David. I got married when I was 18 the first time.
I wouldn’t recommend it, but I had three jobs at any time, and it, what happened was I don’t have a hobby. I’m not saying it with pride. My hobby is business. I love discovery, exploration. I love curiosity. I love opportunity. I love, you know, conceptual challenge, strategic challenges. I’m having a pretty good time at this point in my life.
Jay, it’s been an absolute pleasure and honor to spend time with you today. I want to thank you very much for joining us. Well, thank you. You’re a very impressive person, as I said, and I’ve enjoyed it and you, you’ve drawn out of me some.
