How to Grow Faster Using What You Already Have | Jay Abraham

Business growth strategist Jay Abraham explains how small- and mid-size companies can unlock growth by identifying hidden assets, improving sales performance, and leveraging strategic partnerships. In this episode of Strategic Edge, he outlines how businesses can increase revenue and profitability without additional capital by optimizing what already exists within their organization.

Abraham highlights the untapped value of current customers, undertrained sales teams, and overlooked partnership opportunities. He also shares how analyzing past performance, refining processes, and adopting a more analytical mindset can lead to measurable improvements. By focusing on collaboration, better execution, and incremental gains, businesses can create compounding growth and long-term sustainability.

Key discussion points:

• Why existing customers and prospects are often a company’s most underutilized assets
• How to assess and improve sales team performance through targeted skill development
• The importance of analyzing historical data to uncover growth opportunities
• How partnerships and collaborations can expand reach without added capital
• Why service-based models and recurring revenue create long-term value
• The role of testing, optimization, and disciplined execution in scaling a business

Transcript

Welcome And The Hidden Asset Question

Bridget Fitzpatrick 0:32

Hello everyone and welcome back into the Strategic Edge. I'm Bridget Fitzpatrick here with Jay Abraham. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Jay Abraham 0:38

It's my pleasure.

Bridget Fitzpatrick 0:39

I've got a lot of great questions for you.

Jay Abraham 0:41

And I hope I have great answers.

Bridget Fitzpatrick 0:43

I know you will, and I know your audience is going to get a lot out of this, so I'm very excited. Okay. First one, Jay, what is the single most common hidden asset that you've helped companies discover, and how can entrepreneurs start uncovering their own hidden assets today?

Jay Abraham 0:57

Well,

Existing Buyers As Untapped Value

Jay Abraham 0:58

so I'm going to give you a context and then I'll give you an answer. So my whole career has been predicated on finding hidden assets, overlooked opportunities, underperforming revenue activities, underutilized relationships, under uh undervalued resources, and showing people how to optimize them and then maximize them and then multiply them. There's three gradients. So probably the most overlooked asset people have is their existing prospects and buyers, because they don't really realize how much more utility they can get out of them. The second, if they have a sales force, is their salespeople because uh and I've talked about this, I think, on another uh, but this is pretty profound. Most companies that have any kind of sales force or the equivalent, the equivalent would be distribution channels, distributors, licensees, franchisees, uh, you know, partner companies, they they they're ignorant and arrogant in thinking that a man or a woman who is in involved in selling is omnipotent. They expect if you're a salesperson, they would expect you to be masterful at opening accounts, they would think you'd be masterful at selling all your products, they would think you'd be masterful at holding margin, they would think you would be masterful at retention, they would think you'd be masterful at introducing new products, they would think you'd be masterful at different types of buyers, whether it could be industries or decision makers. And that's anything but true. It's it's the opposite of truth. You're gonna be strong in certain things and weak in others. Most sales forces have not even been trained in consultative selling, they've not been trained in um trust building, and and yet they've not been trained in, and and I'm gonna be hypocritical because I've got a little bit of a gravelly voice, but they haven't been trained in uh in strategic communication, how to evoke trust, authenticity, how to ask questions, how to listen. And yet all those soft skills have been documented

Mapping Sales Strengths To Roles

Jay Abraham 3:18

and research measured that each one can multiply impact and income by sometimes orders of magnitude, 300%, 200%. Also, if most companies don't have a clue what each salesperson excels at, you might be much greater at opening accounts than maintaining accounts. I might be great at dealing with a certain category. Let's say that I sell advertising, but maybe you're in the you've got the entrepreneur, but you've got the car dealer too. Let's say that I'm great at selling car dealers, but I only have two dealers in my community, but I'm better at selling them and selling them the lion's share of the advertising in my platform, even though they have all the choices, but I only can do it a little bit. But let's say nobody else is that good. Well, if you knew I was many times better, you could make me the national car dealer person. I can go around and sell them and somebody else could maintain them. You might be better at at uh upgrading to other product service combinations. But first thing I try to get people to do this as a hidden asset, is seeing who excels at what and measuring how much more they excel. So maybe you're three times better at opening accounts than I am. Maybe you're 30% better at getting someone to buy the premium version or combination. Maybe you're not as good at retention. So I want to find where you're the best and where you're the least. And I want to figure out how much better you are. If you're 20% better, I want to take everybody who's 20% or so better in your category of skill, and I want to analyze what you guys do differently. Your mindset, your approach, nomenclature, follow-through, pre-post, and I want to try to integrate all that and teach it to everybody else who's not 20% as good. And then if you're massively better, I want to harness that by making you a specialist. And when you just do those two things, you can increase performance of every salesman or woman by 10, 20, 30 percent for no more investment, no more staff. It's pretty interesting, isn't it?

Diagnose Skills Using Data And Interviews

Bridget Fitzpatrick 5:32

It is. And is the only way to figure that out is by having them do it and figuring out what they're good at and what they're not good at?

Jay Abraham 5:37

Well, it's it no, the way to do it is to start by identifying the denominators you want to you want to study and trying. If you the only way if you don't have enough data to be able to to uh to uh extract by application, then you have to start today. But if you can go historic, and it doesn't have to be definitive, it can be indicative. I mean, if you start looking, if you say, well, I want to study, here's when you say, okay, what are the processes I want to evaluate? Well, one is opening accounts, one is converting different kinds of prospects. One might be cold calling, one might be uh walk-in, depends on on what you're selling. One might be different generic types of industries, one might be different kinds of decision makers. You might sell you sell three different kinds. One is it's CFO, one is the owner, one is you know, something else. One is gonna be upgrading. How many other and upgrading can mean two or three things. It can mean premium, it can be combinations, it can be, it can be additional, additional um quantity. One is gonna be, you know, sustaining, I mean, repeat and and retention. And if you don't have clinical data, you start with him with anecdotal. You go, okay, I don't really have it for sure, but I know that Bridget is much better at opening accounts, or I know that uh Chris is much better at upgrading people to larger purchases, or I know that this category of buyer resonates so much more with Sam. And then you try to figure out what they do consciously or subconsciously, and then you take the extraction of interviewing everybody in each category who's better and consolidating it and then teaching it to the people who are weak. And if you can get a salesperson who is strong in three things, but not profound in seven, and you can make the seven that they're not profound at 10, 20 percent better, the combination is you double their performance. And they didn't cost you any more. It just took you doing things differently. So that's another thing.

Stop Being Successfully Stuck

Jay Abraham 7:51

Also, most people don't test a lot of variables, they don't test different ads, they don't test different sales approaches, they don't test different propositions, they don't test different um packages, they don't test different guarantees, they don't test different bonuses, when all of those elements I just rat-tat-tatted have all been proven singularly to multiply properly used performance. So there's a starting point.

Bridget Fitzpatrick 8:16

Right. Especially when things are going well. You say, okay, everything's going great, let's just keep doing what we've been doing. Yeah.

Jay Abraham 8:22

You know, when they could go well, I call it successfully stuck. Many, many companies and many, many entrepreneurs, CEOs are successfully stuck, justifiably proud that they are performing at or above industry levels, but not even recognizing how much more performance, profitability, possibility exist in what they do, how they do it, where they do it, people doing it, the money they're spending, the access they have, the interaction they're getting, all of those are levers, as I talked about in a few in a a couple of shows ago, and most people don't capitalize on any of them.

Bridget Fitzpatrick 9:00

Yeah. That's sad.

Jay Abraham 9:02

It's interesting, isn't it?

Bridget Fitzpatrick 9:04

Yeah, you're speaking the truth here. All right, now let's go on to the next question. You've spoken

Strategic Alliances As Best Leverage

Bridget Fitzpatrick 9:08

often about leverage, intellectual, relational, financial. What form of leverage do you believe is most underutilized in 2025 and 20 now 2026? And how should leaders deploy it for geometric growth?

Jay Abraham 9:23

Well, years ago I was interviewed by uh a big a big media uh company, and they asked me a question. If they could because I have now 97 proprietary methodologies for generating exponential bottom line growth. And they said, if we took everything away from but one, and that was the only one you could use for the rest of your life, what would it be and why? And I said, it's is I don't even need a second, a millisecond. I said it would be strategic alliances, joint ventures, power partnering, it's all derivatives of the same. I said, why would you want to go and compete in the open market with no advantage when you can partner with somebody who's already spent years, millions of dollars deploying uh people, performance, products, uh credibility, and has access and trust of the same market you want, but is not at all competitive if you can get them to promote you, to partner with you, to endorse you, to make you the recommended provider. And then today I've got data that even greater supports that. 2,000 of the top corporations in the United States right now get 20% of their revenue, but 40% of their profit from partnerships. It's the most infallible way to grow, and all you have to do is say who's already got a trusted relationship with the same audience I I deliver or I target, and uh what does it take to collaborate with them and either incentivize them in some ethical profit sharing or reciprocal or added value. And you know, we've done it, you know, I I was in the seminar business, you and I've talked about it off point. I did a quarter billion dollars when I was in it, and we did it in about four years, pretty significant because this was 20-some years ago. And I I invested almost nothing out of my pocket. What I did instead was I got 30 different financial newsletters that had worked very hard to not only attract their subscribers, but deliver credible recommendations that didn't bury them, so they had trust, and most of their subscribers were entrepreneurs or professionals. I got Success Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine. Back when they had in-flight magazines, the in-flight magazines. I had two uh seminar, two large uh management seminar companies. I then had on a worldwide basis the number one uh event uh organizer in Singapore, in Japan, in China, in Malaysia, in Vietnam, in uh the UK, all promoting for me, all deploying all their team, all their overhead, all their goodwill, all their years and years of compound trust. And I only paid them a share of the results when the results were in my bank. We've I mean we've even done it with professionals, because you could talk to a professional and a doctor or a lawyer said, well, we can't we can't pay for business. And I said, No, but you can do reciprocal. One time we got a ophthalmic surgeon to to endorse a trust and a state attorney, and vice versa, because they had both the same audience. They had to first gain respectful appreciation and true trust for the integrity, the professionalism, and the advanced or the superior value these both of them offered. But once they overcame that by just endorsing each other, they both made about $250,000 a year. And I'm talking about just in a local city. So I mean it's infallible, but nobody does it.

Bridget Fitzpatrick 13:12

Yeah. And everybody could. There's the opportunity for any business that you're in.

Jay Abraham 13:17

There's always going to be somebody else that has the same audience and the trust, and all you have to do is figure out who they are.

Partnership Proof From Real Deals

Jay Abraham 13:24

I think I tell a story, but I'll tell it again because it's really interesting. I've told it, I'm sure, on one of the other um the other sessions you did with me or Jim did with me. Uh

The Motorcycle And Lawnmower Breakthrough

Jay Abraham 13:33

so I had a client many years ago. That wasn't a client, he was an attendee to one of my seminars in China. Very nice young man. First seminar I ever did there, he came up at the end. We used to do QA through translation, and he asked a very heartfelt question. He 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, I'm a small local motorcycle manufacturer. Only in China, where you have a hundred million population city, would you be a local motorcycle manufacturer? And he said, if I could get the money, I'd like to go all over Asia and I'd like to find a location, set up a huge factory, recruit salespeople in all the countries, you know, build a dealer network and sell my motorcycles everywhere. And I said, okay, but I understand the problem. And he thought I was being cynical. And he goes, I can't get the money. I said, but let's ask a different question. What would you use the money for if you had it? And I said, let's look at it. You'd use it to acquire a factory, to put equipment in that factory, to hire people to produce parts, assemblies, to make motorcycles. Then you would hire salespeople in each country, and you would probably have to rent offices, and then you would have to have someone train them, and then you would have to build materials and the like for dealers. I said, but if somebody already has all that, all you have to do is show them that you are the solution to a bigger problem or opportunity they have. And I said, somebody in Asia has a massive factory. Someone in Asia that has that massive factory has salespeople and representation in a bunch, if not all, of the countries. Somebody that has all that probably has thousands of dealers selling whatever they're selling. If whatever they're selling is complementary to you but not competitive, and you can show them that by putting your product through their manufacturing, if they have underutilization, through their Salesforce, which don't cost anymore, but reduce all that cost it you would normally incur, their offices that are already leased and paid for, and their dealer network that already exists, you could build together a huge business overnight, and that business would just be incremental profit that they have already earned. They just sort of like one of those old bonds that your grandfather bought you in 1919. It just keeps accruing interest you never collect. And I said, Do that. And that and so that was just pretty throwaway. That about a year and a half or two years later, he came to another seminar, same thing, question answer at the end. And he's smiling like the Cheshire cat. And he said, I did what you said. And and uh Bridget, I answer so many questions and do so many hot seats, I don't remember anything. So I said, What did I tell you? And he repeated what I told you. I said, What'd you do? He said, I went on a field trip. I went all over Asia. When I got to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, I found Asia's largest lawnmower manufacturer. They had a massive factory they were underutilizing on the second shift. They had deal, they had salespeople in 11 or 10 countries, I can't remember how many. They had thousands of dealers. All I had to do was teach their people how to manufacture the parts, assemblies necessary to make my motorcycles and retool. I had to bring what's called the tool and dice to retool the equipment they already had, the factories they already had, the people they were willing to hire. I had to train the salespeople to recruit the dealers and train the dealers to merchandise. And he said, in our first two years together, we both made over $20 million profit, and that was the start. But somebody else already has your audience, somebody else has a bigger problem or opportunity that your product service can be the solution to, and failure to recognize that is failure to add basically an inordinate amount of more profit to your business than theirs.

30-Day Traction With Limited Capital

Bridget Fitzpatrick 17:46

Now, if you were starting a business today in a saturated industry with limited capital, what would you do in the first 30 days to gain traction and become unforgettable?

Jay Abraham 17:57

Well, it depends on what I was doing. If I were starting a business or acquiring a business, it would probably be in the service sector for two reasons. The incremental cost of fulfilling is very low, and the repeat probability is very high. So you have a lot of allowable cost in the beginning to acquire somebody, you have a lot of predictable future profit, and you also have a much higher uh asset value when you sell it because it's got a lot of predictable, sustainable revenue, and acquirers like that. So what I would do is in the beginning, I would go to everybody I could, and I would either ask them to offer it to their audience and give them either 100% of the first month or maybe a hundred percent of the first quarter and make it so irresistible to them that everybody was promoting it to their audience because I want the back end. I want my if I gave them 100% of the first three months, I want month four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, add infinito. That's what I'd probably do.

Bridget Fitzpatrick 19:01

That's great. I love it. Now one more, and we'll let you let you go. You've

A Framework For Breakthrough Opportunities

Bridget Fitzpatrick 19:06

worked in uh 1,000 plus industries.

Jay Abraham 19:08

Yes.

Bridget Fitzpatrick 19:09

What mindset or thinking framework do you use to immediately identify breakthrough opportunities in any business?

Jay Abraham 19:16

Well, part of it is uh is uh sort of not latent, part of it is almost automatic now. But when I wasn't automatic, I would basically start first thing I would do is want to gauge what they're doing, and I would take it into uh into granularity. So if you're selling, that's a macro concept, how are you selling? Are you selling cold calling? Are you selling uh by generating leads? Are you selling at trade shows? Are you selling by dinners, seminars? And then I would take what you're doing, and the first thing I would do is ref reflect on everybody I'd ever met that was doing the same thing, and if they did it the same way or differently. Then I'd then I'd relate to people that were doing different ways of selling and seeing if any of that could be extrapolated. Then I would look at at who you're attracting, and then I would look at how you are executing, and that means what you're saying, the process you're using, how you're proving it. And I would just sort of do a a hierarchy partially automatically, partially knowingly, and then I would look at everything that was going on, and then I would reiterate all the insights I had. And if it was too much to test at one time, because even if it worked, you wouldn't know what factor was the driver. I would start with the highest yielding, easiest to test first factor. So if the way you're if you're sending an invitation to everybody in a city for a dinner seminar, I would say, well, how many better ways can we first of all target only the ones you want? How many better ways can we make the message have more payoff value? How many uh better ways can we make the the the um the bullets you're going to learn uh almost irresistible? How many ways can we even describe the dinner to make it more succulent? How many ways can we tell you what you will walk away with so we we we show you not just the static? And I'd go through things like that. And I think my mind is just now probably inculcated to think that way.

Bridget Fitzpatrick 21:36

It's just second nature, yeah.

Jay Abraham 21:37

But I think when I was starting, I did it more mechanical. I'd say, okay, how many companies have I ever done that did any variation of whatever the form of because selling is a macro, it's not really meaning anything. You can say, well, we have we we we have salespeople, but it doesn't mean anything. How how do they get their prospects? How do they sell? Is it a single cell? Is it a multiple cell? Each of those has a different dynamic. Is it a product? Is it a Service, is it combinations? Do there upgrades to it? Is the real profit on the warranty or on the, you know, where where's the whole economics of it? And I need to know all that because no two are the same.

Execution Mindset And Preeminence Ethics

Bridget Fitzpatrick 22:12

Is there a certain characteristic that you see in small business owners that when you see that, you know that's what it takes to for them to understand what you're saying and take it to the next level?

Jay Abraham 22:23

The people that I relate the most with have a few commonalities, and these are the ones that I'm attracted to. First of all, they're monsters of execution, they have a prejudice towards action, they are not wedded to tradition, they're very open-minded, they are very collaborative, and finally they're very equitable because even though I get a very large retainer, my my focus when I work with a company is I want a piece, not necessarily equity, but I want a piece of the increased profit I create from what they're doing and the increased profit I create from what they're not doing. And if they're not equitable and they don't understand that if I can bring them, you know, three million dollars more a year in profit than they had, and they have to give me back, you know, a fourth or a third of it after it's in their bank, I just it they didn't pay me anything. I paid them. And it's a very unique personality. A lot of people, it's funny. We will go, we do a lot of Tony Robbins events and we get a lot of clients there. And the biggest, ironically, the biggest uh resistance my salespeople tell me is that people will pay the base retainer, and it's high, but they don't want to pay the the the the the reven, the profit share, and I'll say, if so if I said to you you're making eight hundred thousand dollars, if I make you three million, which is basically two point two more, would you give me back a quarter for the for the for the 75 cents I put in your bank and they're saying no, I wouldn't do that.

Bridget Fitzpatrick 24:00

That tells you a lot.

Jay Abraham 24:01

Well, a lot of times I try to help people. When we deal with a really uh I'm gonna call it a closed-minded person, but an illogical thinker, we say, okay, let me tell you what you just said so you know it. You said that you would rather work continually and and accept what you're getting rather than having somebody basically grow your profits two or three times and ask for a share of just the newfound, and you don't want that. You don't want the value it would bring you in what you could do in your personal life, you don't want the fact that it could buy you a five or ten million dollar home, you don't want the two or three Mercedes it could lease and the five or six round-the-world cruises, you don't want the extra five, ten, fifteen million dollars of wealth it would create, you don't want any of that. That's what you're saying. Am I hearing you correctly? And they go, Oh, I didn't really mean that. But a lot of people don't understand that the the the illogic of what they say as opposed to also the illogic of what they do. I say there is no shame in not knowing and doing something the only way that you perceive. But there's terrible shame in knowing and doing the same thing after that. Right. Because you should be in business for the first reason you should be in business is not to make money, it's to make a difference. And if you're there to make a difference, this goes into my strategy of preeminence. And the difference you make is to make people better off by making them more money, making them safer, making them healthier, making them more secure, making them happier, whether you're entertainment, whether you're financial services, whether you're comfort, whether you're prestige. And you do it better than anyone else. You have a moral obligation and a responsibility to attract as many people as you can, not because you want to make as much money as you can, but you don't want them to be deserved by people who don't do that much for them. And I get I I hurt for people who accept a fraction of a fraction of the outcome and the income they could be achieving. Yeah. It just hurts for me if they if they're really, if they have a nobility about what they're trying to do. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Bridget Fitzpatrick 26:18

Then it must be so rewarding when you see the other side of it.

Jay Abraham 26:22

It is, but what happens a lot, and and I guess it's human nature, is once you get people to that point, they tend to want to be more uh what's the word I would use? Not autocratic, but they don't want to sustain the relationship, partially financially, and partially they want to feel the power that they're doing it. So a lot of times I will have very, very, very great relationships and will achieve a lot, but it won't sustain after usually my typical engagement is three years. It can be shorter, it can be longer. We also do static one day. But uh I find people when you make them a lot of money. I have a client as an example. I made him uh about $25 million a year. And uh it was one of the earlier things I did, and I just got a fee. I didn't get any percentage. And he feels bad and he sends me six figures a year, but he never talks to me. He just sends me every month, you know, ten or twenty thousand dollars because he feels bad.

Bridget Fitzpatrick 27:30

That's nice.

Jay Abraham 27:31

It is. But but he doesn't feel he doesn't but if somebody helped you do that, and that was five or ten years ago, and you assume the person isn't static and isn't calcified and is keeps growing, wouldn't you want to know what they know today that they didn't know ten years ago? But it's interesting. It's human psychology is just fascinating. But yeah, but it's interesting. I've had a very storied career, got to do a lot of things around the world, still do them, have very interesting clients, interesting challenges, problems, opportunities, Gordian knots I have to solve. It's very fascinating.

Jay’s Blind Spots And Closing

Bridget Fitzpatrick 28:06

Is there anything in your business that you're not doing or you're holding back on?

Jay Abraham 28:11

Oh, I'm a hypocrite. I am so busy consulting that my business is the equivalent of uh of uh cobbler's kids with no shoes. Yes, yes. We don't do a lot of self-marketing. Uh I don't I don't do a lot of social media. Uh I have a very prominent, iconic uh people that I associate with, but I would never put that on. I I mean it's a very private thing. I don't want my home or my life or my family public. Uh I have a spectacular beach house, but you'll never see anything. I have very nice cars, but you're not gonna see me flaunt it. It's not what I do. But I don't do a lot of self-marketing, which all all my contemporaries do. And I have 21 books and I never promote them. Uh I just created them to see if I could articulate a thesis or or a concept. Yeah, I mean it's uh I would fire myself if I was my own client. And also uh a lot of people make a lot of money teaching it. I prefer doing it. There's a certain i it's it's much more real when you're on the front lines of capitalism and you have to walk through the tunnel and perform. It's much different than being up. I mean, I I've done plenty of being on stage and doling out theoretical beliefs and and um and uh and ideals for three days and sounding really impressive and having everybody genuflex and then go back and do nothing.

Bridget Fitzpatrick 29:41

Yeah.

Jay Abraham 29:42

And it I don't enjoy that. I enjoy being challenged to really deliver. And most of the time, if the other side is really collaborative, we will. If they're not, we won't. But it's not I know the methods work, I just don't know if people will work the method. Right. So it's interesting.

Bridget Fitzpatrick 29:58

It is interesting, and we love the passion that you have for helping people and appreciate it very much.

Jay Abraham 30:03

Thank you. I appreciate the forum. Thank you very much.

Bridget Fitzpatrick 30:06

Thank you very much.

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