Jay Abraham – LA Venture Association
by Elaine Morris Palmer, November , 2000
As seen on Digitrends Online
At a time when a lot of Internet companies are re-evaluating the businesses they are in (known on the street as “re-focusing our strategy”), technically enabled business models that leverage new economy opportunities and deliver old economy performance will win. Enter the power of geometry.
Take 1,000 clients multiply by a $100 transaction, times 2 transactions per year.
Total: $200,000. Increase three numbers by 10% and your income expands by 33.1 %. A 25 % increase in these categories nearly doubles your income.
This simple formula is the basis of Jay Abraham’s business model — upside leverage, or the power of unmade connections. These connections provide the basis for strategies, often obvious solutions, that can increase income, power, influence and success.
Change my life, you query? Get those pesky vultures from that standing dot.com to quit circling my office equipment? Yes, engineer stunning advances for your business and leave everyone else in your dust! Sound like an infomercial? Wait, there’s more.
Take this example from Jay’s new book, “Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got.” (slightly abridged in the interest of word count):
Two men are mugged. Neither one is harmed. Mugger #1 takes the man’s wallet and all his cash — $85. Mugger number two has a different approach toward his “business”.
Mugger #2 takes the other man’s wallet, the cash, $70, plus his watch and his Princeton class ring. The watch and ring were not expensive and had no real street value. Ordinarily, that would be the end of the story.
But, two days later, man #1 walks out of his New York City apartment on his way to the office…he turns around to find the man who mugged him. The mugger asks the man if he would like his watch and Princeton ring back. As both items held great sentimental value to him the man says yes. The mugger offers to sell them back for $500. The man only has $90. The mugger takes the money and after offers the man the ticket from the pawn shop where the goods had been exchanged. The total take for the mugger on the transaction is $85.
Mugger #2, applying simple income-increasing strategies and uncovering hidden assets, opportunities, and possibilities made $70 on the mugging, $60 by pawning the watch and ring, and $90 by selling the pawn ticket back to the man he mugged. Total income, $220.
The moral of the story: focus on your business realities. Create upside leverage.
Using anectdotes like this one, Jay Abraham slams his point home helping grow more than four hundred companies including IBM, Microsoft, Citibank and Charles Schwab. His “hidden in plain sight” way of looking at business (or any enterprise) starts with 50 questions analyzing process and motives. They range from ”Would I rather attract more new clients or garner more money from my existing clients and why.” to “When I create a new client for my business or profession, who else have I directly created a new client for?”
Harvey Mackay, author of such NY Times bestsellers as Swim With The Sharks, christened Abraham, “America’s #1 Marketing Wizard”. Yet, he has no formal higher education and is the self-proclaimed poster boy for adult attention deficit disorder. No wonder he’s worked with clients in 400 unrelated industries. This, he asserts, gives him insights into the assets, people, performance and opportunities that businesses usually overlook.
From 30 thousand feet, what Abraham discovered was that correlating revenue-generating processes among businesses reveals that multiple concepts from one or two industries are common to all. Once identified, these concepts bring the “money connection” or revenue maximizers in those otherwise hidden opportunities minimizing cost and risk and optimizing yield. Insights that he calls “funnel vision” or successful practices that cross over from one industry to another.
The cornerstones of funnel vision that produce exponential gain are:
- Maximize by quantifying and evaluating what you are already doing–
Ask yourself what the integrated processes and sub-processes are that combine to drive revenues.
Then, tighten the conscious or unconscious variants by figuring out who knows what in your organization and teach what that person knows. Shared verbiage, mindset and strategy concentrate and maximize intellectual assets.
- Borrow successful processes from in and outside your industry.
Save time, save R&D money and pre-empt your competition by dominating the market.
o Build a Strategy of Preeminence.
Challenge and question. Differentiate yourself by resisting commoditization. Distinguish yourself attitudinally by turning customers into clients. Be a problem solver, not a problem bringer.
With this as a foundation, you are on your way to building the “Power Parthenon” or lots of pillars of complimentary business elements pulling together for higher performing opportunities.
Abraham cautions us that people often fall in love with the wrong thing — their own product, service or companies, for example, rather than their clients. This shortsightedness leads to underleveraging. Solve the clients problems and you’re adding value, creating a branded channel of trust thereby adding the number of clients you have and the utility and frequency of use of your product or service.
Then add one more dimension of process improvement – the financial dynamics – and, guarantees Abraham, the impact is mindboggling. Multiply 10% by all the processes and it becomes geometric. Says Abraham, “put the power of geometry into your business.”
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Jay Abraham is noted for his marketing War College seminars. His recently -authored book “Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You’ve Got “ is published by St. Martin’s Press and is available in bookstores and comes with a 30 day money back guarantee! Find out more on his website
LA Venture Association (LAVA) supports the development of emerging growth companies in Southern California by providing access to financial, professional and technological resources. www.lava.org
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