How to Multiply Results Without More Resources | Jay Abraham

Business growth strategist Jay Abraham explains why most businesses plateau not because of competition or market conditions, but because they focus on isolated tactics rather than scalable drivers. In this episode of Strategic Edge, he shares a framework for identifying small, deliberate changes that compound over time to generate exponential growth.

Abraham emphasizes shifting from short-term activity to long-term strategy, leveraging marketing, business models, relationships, and internal processes more effectively. By rethinking existing operations, optimizing offerings, and applying leverage across multiple growth drivers, businesses can accelerate results without adding unnecessary resources or risk. He also highlights the importance of ideology and mindset, showing how challenging assumptions can unlock competitive advantage and sustainable performance.

Key discussion points:

• Moving from tactical execution to strategic leverage for long-term growth
• Marketing as a force multiplier through targeted testing and optimization
• Expanding distribution and diversifying business models for scalability
• Leveraging intellectual, human, and relational capital to reduce risk
• Optimizing products, services, and internal processes for compounding impact
• Adopting a growth-oriented mindset and questioning industry assumptions

Transcript

elcome And Exponential Growth Framework

SPEAKER_00 0:27

Today, Abraham, exclusively on AFB.

SPEAKER_03 0:32

Today Abraham, another edition of the Strategic Edge. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your schedule to join us on the show once again.

SPEAKER_02 0:39

My pleasure once again.

SPEAKER_03 0:40

We have talked in uh off-air here a number of times about the nine drivers of exponential growth. Talk to us about that and the importance of realizing what those are.

SPEAKER_02 0:51

It's a pretty powerful uh concept in my arsenal or my portfolio of uh exponential uh performance methodologies. So let me give you context. After I realized that you could work on what I call the geometry of a business and you could operate in the exponential zone and not the incremental zone, I was obsessed and I became driven on a mission to uncover and understand every facet of exponential upside leverage I could identify that had almost no downside risk. And I was been pursuing it for the better part of my whole career. And I have a lot of different distinctions. But I always wanted to know what's the least amount of effort, shift, change that you could make that would produce the maximum amount of positive difference. And I came up with these nine drivers and uh they're pretty cool. So I'll go through as many as possible and try to explain why they're so interesting to me and so powerful for your for your audience. So the first is strategy. And before I get into strategy, I need to tell you that most entrepreneurs, if you ask them what their strategy is, their answer is going to be really tactical. Okay. They don't even understand. The strategy is the game you're playing, it's how you advance and enhance everything. But I'll tell a story that denominates the difference between being strategic and being tactical.

trategy Versus Tactics Diamond Story

SPEAKER_02 2:24

So uh years ago when they first came out with artificial diamonds, they were originally cubic zirconium. Today they're lab grown. Sure. But cubic zirconium was a really cool item. They were very inexpensive, but they were very beautiful, and a bunch of people were selling them. And I had two friends that wanted to go into that business. True story. One of them was a great copywriter, but he was a tactical thinker. The other one was not a great copywriter, but he was a brilliant strategist. Okay. So copywriter won, the great tactical person, came up with a funny idea. He came up with the Beverly Hills Diamond Company and a Beverly Hills Diamond, and he ran full-page ads and all the newspapers offering a one-carat loose stone for $39. He spent about $25,000 to test it. It brought in about $42,000. After all the expenses, he made about $7,000, which for him was not a lot of money, and so he collapsed the concept in its infancy. If I stopped the story there, it wouldn't be interesting. But now let's go to I used to do this on stage and I'd go left with talking about the tactical person and right talking about the strategic person. So now let's go to to the strategist. His copy was not as well written, but it was very inspired. The name he came up with was called Van Pliss and Tissony, and it was a take on Van Pliss, Van Cleef, and Arpell Antissines. And he came up with the Van Pliss diamond. His was $39. His copy wasn't as strong and powerful. He spent $25,000, and instead of doing $40,000,000, he did about $36,000 and lost about six grand. Now, I could stop the story there and it would be sad, but it wasn't. Now back to friend one who was the tactical person. He made seven grand, didn't think it was worthwhile. He put his loose stone in a very, very crappy, excuse my language, uh little corrugated little little cardboard container, stuck it in an envelope with a little note, and sent it off to fulfill. Friend two, who was a brilliant strategist, put his in a velvet jeweler's bag inside a simulated wood box, inside a bubble, bubble envelope. That's the first thing. Friend one, who was tactical, had a little like almost a pathetic note. Here's your here's your uh your loose uh Beverly Hills diamond. I hope you enjoy it. Friend two, the strategist had two documents in his. One was a letter from him as the CEO of the company, thanking the recipient for having had enough blind trust to take advantage of this offer. And in it he said, and I need to tell you before you you take the stone out of the jeweler's case, a few things. First of all, it is going to be more beautiful, more radiant, more fiery, more brilliant, more exotic looking than all the ad could possibly explain, and you're gonna be bedazzled. Second, you're gonna be a little bit off put because it's gonna seem smaller than you think. It's not because we cheated you, it's because in order to get that kind of brilliance, it's more dense. And he said, when people see how much more beautiful it is than we even describe, they almost all contact us and want to buy larger loose stones, four, ten, twelve carat ones, and go to their jeweler and have it set in earrings and pendants and brooches. And we used to very very uh eagerly honor that until we found out what the jewelers were charging them to set it. And we thought it was atrocious because we are also manufacturing jewelers, and we have taken the time to set some of the most beautiful larger stones in gorgeous earrings, pendants, rings, and you will find attached a brochure that shows you all of the items we've got, and we would like to offer you the ability to choose anyone you want. You may purchase it on a non-binding basis, whereby we insist you wear it for at least a month. And if you're not bedazzled, if you don't get more compliments you've ever gotten on anything you've ever owned, send it back. Or take the stone and the and the fitting to a jeweler, to a legitimate jeweler, and ask them what they would charge to replace or replicate it. And if it isn't at least twice what we charge, send it back. And in or and we'll be happy to give your money back. And in in grateful appreciation for you having had blind trust to buy the first loose stone, we would like to give you double credit if you wish to send it back. And oh, by the way, we've included a postage prepaid return envelope that you can use for not only the return but the order. Friend one made seven grand and quit. Friend two lost about six grand and made twenty-five million dollars his first year in profit.

SPEAKER_04 7:42

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_02 7:42

That's the difference between being strategic and tactical. It's a long story, but I think it was worth it.

SPEAKER_03 7:48

That's exactly right. 25 million.

SPEAKER_02 7:50

Yep. Wow. So most small businesses are not strategic at all. They do things episodically, they do things intermittently, they do things tactically, they don't do anything, they don't even have the big game they're playing. If you don't even know the game you're playing long term, how can you win?

SPEAKER_03 8:08

Right.

SPEAKER_02 8:08

So the first way to the one of the first drivers of exponential growth is to move from being tactical to strategic. Right. And we did a a whole analysis research on all the different companies that blew past everybody and almost to the to the it each one, they were super strategic.

SPEAKER_03 8:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 8:32

So learn how to be more strategic. Study strategy. I mean, in a subsequent one, I can give you a whole lecture on it. But right now, the first and the most interesting driver is going from tactical to strategic. Right.

arketing Leverage Points That Multiply Results

SPEAKER_02 8:45

The second is marketing. Oh, by the way, you change your strategy, change your results. Change your marketing, you change your results. Right. How many ways can you change your marketing? Well, you can change the segment of the market you you address, the way that you you reach them, you can change the message you make, you can change the positioning you have, you can change the proof you use, you can change the risk reversal you use, you can change the sequencing you use, you can change the uh the endorsers you use. I can go on and on and on. You can change the follow-up you use, you can change the upsell, the downsell, the resell. Every one of those is a leverage point, and almost nobody even tries that. So you change your marketing, you'll blow past everybody else, and you'll be shocked. And you can experiment very easily, very safely, very definitively for very little money, and you're going to be shocked by the differential. I have seen a change in headline pull as much as 20 times more results. I have seen a change, as I said earlier in another interview, of the positioning double the results. I've seen a change in how you prove your point. You can prove it with endorsements, you prove it with uh with testimonials, you can prove it with a comparative uh uh uh of of anything from performance, from components. You can prove it with the the profile and the and the uh resumes of the people behind it, uh the the patents, anything you want.

SPEAKER_03 10:22

But so the key is to be trying these different things rather than saying, no, I ran an ad and it didn't work because I lost $7,000 on a diamond. I mean, obviously in that illustration, but there's a lot of business people that fall into that category of the of the first one.

SPEAKER_02 10:35

Remember, I was talking in either this or another one about uh what I said super logic. So if you say, okay, I've got a buyer, what else should I do now that I have there at least partial trust? What other ways can I ethically and meaningfully monetize that that freeze-frame relationship? And most people don't, they just drop it. Yeah. They go, okay, I, you know, and they're tactical and they're and they're static and it makes no sense. So change your strategy, you change your results. Change your marketing, you change your results. Change your business model, you change your

usiness Model And Distribution Multipliers

SPEAKER_02 11:13

results. If your business model is we're gonna sell one thing and that's it, we're never gonna sell anything else, we're never gonna find any ancillary or utility value, that's one thing. If you say we're never gonna have an entry-level product or a no-cost way to start more people in a relationship, that's it. If you say we're never gonna add anything else to the sale to double or triple our profit, your business model is gonna define a lot of things. And there are many business model changes that are easy to verify, validate, and test that can double, redouble, redouble again, the whole trajectory, the success trajectory and the bottom line of your business. So change your strategy, change your results, change your marketing, change results, your business model. Then you change your distribution channels. That can mean partnering, that can mean if you basically do nothing uh and you get your business by word of mouth, having having um referral strategies. It can mean if you don't have a sales force, have a sales force, whether it's captive, whether it's salary, whether it's it means if you don't have uh webinars, you test webinars. If you don't have online, you test online. If you don't do do lunch and learns, you do that. Social media? Yeah, I mean, it and and what I'm all about, which maybe uh isn't evident, you have within your power a force and source of unimaginable, uh I call it multiplicative exponential growth, bringing all these multipliers together. And the each one you can increase just a little, and the combined effect is unimaginable. It's like I was talking, if anybody watched the session we did where we talked about the three ways to grow a business, a mere 10% in three categories is 33%.

SPEAKER_03 13:02

Yeah, it's amazing.

SPEAKER_02 13:03

But it's also could double profit if it's a marginal business. Doubling is 800 percent. Well, that's only one little area of upside geometric leverage. There are, as I will share in subsequent episodes, there you have 97 categories. Not not not just singular, but each category might have 10 leverage points. It is near infinite. And each addition, it just multiplies and multiplies and multiplies. Uh the the the the analogy that probably everybody could easily understand. Today AI is so powerful. Of course.

SPEAKER_03 13:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:43

Every minute when the AI is being asked a million questions and it is answering it, that's just multiplying its knowledge base, its access to all kinds of scenarios. Well, in your business, you really have 97 potential categories of upside exponential performance enhancement. Are you going to do 97? Probably not. Yeah. Just like you're not going to do 200, 125 referral strategies. But if you do none, that's right. And you add three or four or five and they're the safest and the easiest. That's right. But they're infallible to multiply performance results, profitability, buyers, positioning, uh, credibility, over time, it's just amazing. If you had one more every week, month, quarter, year, and it took you this long to get to where you are, but what if you can double, redouble, and what if you can keep growing, going and not just going, but growing beyond normalcy every year, even when you've got brutal theoretical competition. See, I believe there's tons of generic competition, but there are very there's very little viable competition when you think differently. If you don't think differently, it's daunting. Yeah. You go, uh again, Sisyphus pussy. You don't want to get out of bed. But when you realize that they're all doing the same thing the same way with limited superficial thinking, and you're the strategic thinker, you're this critical thinker, this, you're super logical thinker, this, you're the exponential thinker, they can't even come close. You just run rings around them. That's right. And it doesn't cost any more. It just requires you to do things very differently than everybody else. Right. So now distribution channels. There's all kinds of ways to do it. Partnering, Salesforce, as I said, and if I used to, it used to be very funny. Uh when I did live seminars, we might have a thousand people in the room. And I'd say, okay, how many people in the room get all their business from pretty much a sales force? X percent. Raise your hand. How many from word-of-mouth uh referrals? X percent. How many from uh distributors? X percent. How many from trade show booths? X percent. And we'd go through all. I'd say, okay. Then I'd go through the people that did it. And I'd say, okay, give me the amount of business you get from that singular. So let's say from referrals, it's it's you know, $10 million a year.

SPEAKER_03 16:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:19

From Salesforce, uh it's $30 million a year. Could be $3 million, $2 million, half million. From trade shows, $5 million. I'd say, okay, if this person gets $5 million only doing that, if you added that to your business, if you wouldn't get five million, if you only got half a million, would that be worthwhile? And a lot of these additions reach the market differently than others. And and so you either advance or you access markets. You advance markets that didn't respond significantly to the main way you're doing it, and most of the main ways are reactive or nothing at all.

SPEAKER_03 16:57

Right.

SPEAKER_02 16:57

I mean, it's surprising how many entrepreneurs do a very modest amount of real marketing, selling, and who have uh a referral business that don't have even one referral

apital And Hidden Intellectual Property Value

SPEAKER_02 17:08

strategy. So that the next thing is capital. How many ways can you use money or other kinds of resources? Intellectual capital, financial capital, human capital, relational capital. So how many ways can you use money? Well, you can move fixed cost to variable. Instead of paying you speculatively, I only pay for results. Right. You can get deferred compensation. I'll pay you over time. I'll get mine now, but I'll pay you later. So it's earning and paying its own weight. Sure. You can get other companies who benefit from the same audience to share the cost. I mean go on and on and on, and that's with money. With intellectual capital, what can you do with your IP? Well, first of all, know what it is. You can have IP that you can monetize more than your business. That sounds interesting, doesn't it? Let me tell you a couple of stories. I had a client a couple of years ago who was a lumber mill. And uh I had to learn about a lumber mill. So here's here's the here's how a lumber mill works, and I'll tell you about my client's unique superpower. A lumber mill starts with a tree. They cut it down, they take the bark off, they cut it into boards, but it's green and soft. The only way it goes from green and soft to hard and firm is being heated in a super-sized kiln. Goes through it, it's heated, it ends up, if everything goes well, you end up with this very desirable, hard, buildable board. The drying of the kiln drying is the singular biggest expense because it's energy. Yeah, it's either gas or oil or propane or I don't think it's electricity, but it's 30 or 40 percent of the whole cost of the business. Um and my client was a kiln drying fanatic. He figured out how to how to provide kiln drying mastery for about 35% less than the industry standard. That's good. He also figured out how to do it in a way where he got almost no waste scrap, and he got almost all what's like I would call double A, like premium, okay instead of lesser. So he's winning on energy, he's winning on quality, he's winning on premium value, he's winning on not wasting. That's the good news. Bad news is he could give that lumber away, and after about a thousand miles, you couldn't afford to accept it free because the transportation costs would be too high. So we codified his kiln drying methodology, we got databases of lumber mills all over the world, we explained to them the advantages of what he had at very hard cost, effort, time, experimentation, and we built up the value through those preemptive approaches that I talked about in another session. We got about 250 lumber mills to agree to pay $25,000 a year to use his kiln drying methodology. He was making about $2 million a year. This is still good from his lumber mill, but he's making $6 million for letting other people use it. We did the same thing with the car wash. We had a car wash that had a methodology for upgrading to the premium package, and it was many times more than the industry's norm, and they were making something like $22,000 extra dollars a month for using it, but their drawing market was five miles. I mean, you're not gonna go to that car wash in Los Angeles from here. Yeah. So we drew a circle around whatever it was, five, six, seven miles, and we went to every other car wash in the country. We got two thousand to pay a hundred dollars a month to use the kill or the upgrade. So he's making twenty-two thousand using it and two hundred thousand.

SPEAKER_04 20:59

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 21:00

So I'm just saying there's so many different ways. If you have a business and you are more successful than the than 51% of the companies or the businesses you compete against, there's always a driver. Right. This is a derivative. It's not the same driver I'm talking about. There's a driver. It could be how you manage, how you manage inventory, how you manage uh uh cash, how you sell, how you well it doesn't matter. If you don't know what it is, you need to know what it is, and then you need to quantify what it's worth. And then if you're not in a national or international um you know market, you can basically license, sell it as you know, revenue share with anybody else. Right. And even if you are all over, if there's a related non competitive industry, like you're uh, as I said, you're uh HVAC distributor and I'm an electrical supply, you can leverage it there. But there's all these hidden assets. Right. That's sort of interesting. There's no question about it.

elationships And Funding Growth Through Partners

SPEAKER_02 22:06

The next one is relationships. You have to look within your audience. Almost always your product service business appeals to segments of a market you'd never realize it resonate with. Maybe for some reason there's something about your product service that tennis players or pickleball players or people who drive exotic sports cars or triathletes or, you know, or nursing mothers, when you figure that out, then it uncovers a market you can concentrate on. But that's one thing. Also, you can basically use other relationships. If you go back to one of our segments about being preeminent and uh multiplying and not diminishing and building an incredible preemptive connection with your supplier, you can get a lot more from them. I have had clients that wanted to penetrate new markets, and we've gone to suppliers and said, if you'll finance our Salesforce, or if you'll finance our marketing, or if you'll finance our trade shows to that market, we will give you all the revenue that comes from that. And we've gotten them to fund all up. So it's a different way. I can go on and on, but this is the genesis of this.

deology Assumptions And The Tugboat Metaphor

SPEAKER_02 23:21

The last one is the Kitticua. It's ideology. Okay. If you don't believe this to be true, then it isn't. Right. If you don't believe that you can change your strategy and double triple your business, then you're right. If you don't believe you can change your marketing and multiply dramatically the results, you're right. If you don't believe that you could possibly use capital any differently or distribution. So it's all belief. It's all psyched. I mean, Tony Robbins says it. 80% is psychology. Yeah. And if you don't know what your business worldview is, if you don't know what your mental models are, if you don't know, Jim, what you stand for and what you really believe and why, and how that belief is driving your actions, and and and you don't question the assumptions, and I'll give you a derivative here. So you and I have talked a couple of times. Every year I do a full day with Tony Robbins. And we do it with this very high-end group. There's two combined groups. One pays $85,000 a year, one pays $150,000. So they're very high-end. And they come for a day and they pose questions, problems, challenges, opportunities to us. And together we go back and forth. He'll answer it, I'll answer it. Sometimes we're the same answer, sometimes different. Because he's a much more vibrant and dominating force. He normally answers first, which I let. And he'll come up with his answer. And it's usually very profound, semicolon, however, comma. When it's my turn, I say, well, before I answer, I want to verify two different assumptions. And I said, the reason is if the assumptions are wrong, everything that flows from the assumption is wrong. So assumption one is what is the assumption they are basing their question, their issue on?

SPEAKER_03 25:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:08

What is the reality they are they are using to found that question? Right. Number two, what is the assumption we are hearing? Because if we're not hearing what they're saying, if we're not, if they're basing their question on something that's false, everything else we say is useless. That's a good point. And most people don't question the assumptions they've built all their premises on. Yep. You all have hypothesis, you're you're you're driving it's driving you. But if you don't question it and say, is is you know, if your belief is I'm gonna follow the herd and do everything every the way the same way everyone else, because there's no because. Because everyone does it, that's not the reason. The reason is because it's it it's it's suboptimal. It is very rarely the highest and best way to do it.

SPEAKER_03 25:54

Right.

SPEAKER_02 25:55

If you're gonna say, well, I can't possibly do all these experiments because it would take time, and then I would say, okay, well, how reminds me, I'm ADD, but it reminds me of a friend, and you've heard this story, but it's a true story. I have a friend that always wanted to be an attorney. And he he was lamenting one time that he really wished he'd done it, and he was about 50. And I said, Well, why are you doing it now? He goes, Well, I'm 50. I said, Yeah, but if you're gonna live to be 80, you know, five, six years from now, you'll be an attorney. Right. And people understand, I can't do it. Why? If you're gonna be in this business theoretically for years or for forever until you die or sell it, why wouldn't you want to start shifting and commanding and demanding a lot more yield and a lot more control and a lot more certainty and a lot more value out of what you do, who you do it for, where you do it? It's just it's a very interesting question.

SPEAKER_03 26:48

There's there's no question about it. And that individual, you know, for those that say, well, in four years I'm gonna be 54. Well, how old are you gonna be in four years if you don't do it? Yeah, same thing. You're still gonna be 54.

SPEAKER_02 26:58

Well, how much are you gonna make? And how much is your business gonna be worth, and how much are you gonna be, how's your net worth gonna grow or diminish? That's where multiply and diminish comes in if you don't do any of them, if you do one of them. Yes. I mean, people go, Well, I can't do them all. Well, you can do them all if you do them one at a time. Right. And and people say, Well, how can I do all these? I say, You here's how you do them. You first of all take all the things J. Abraham ever stands for and teaches. You put them on a board or you put them on your computer, you put them on your pad. And then you identify the highest and best, the easiest, fastest, safest to do not the ones that are going to make you the most money, but the ones that'll be the easiest win. Why do you want to win? Because when you have a win, it reinforces two things my viability, my veracity, that my my my methods really work, and your ability to work them. And that gives you the certainty, the confidence, and the momentum to do the next and the next and the next. So I'll tell you one more story, and it's got metaphoric examples. Uh uh you've probably, maybe not, but if you lived around Long Beach or you lived in any place that has big freighters coming in, you've probably seen a freighter being pulled in and pushed out by a tugboat. Right. Well, let's take a look at a phenomenon. A freighter can be 20 stories high.

SPEAKER_03 28:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 28:18

A tugboat is maybe three-quarters of one story high. Right. So the freighter is being pulled by ropes tied to the bow that are sometimes that big. So a rope that's that big probably weighs maybe 50 or 100 pounds per this.

SPEAKER_03 28:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 28:36

So you've got this not hundreds, probably thousands of feet of very heavy rope weighing probably 10,000 pounds, yeah, that somehow got over the hull of this 20-foot freighter. How do they do that?

SPEAKER_03 28:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 28:54

Do you know? No. Would you like to? Yes. Because it's metaphorically, it it reinforces and it denominates and it and it um it really makes my point. So what it is is the tugboat has a gun, not unlike the gun that they would shoot t-shirts at a sporting event.

SPEAKER_03 29:12

Right.

SPEAKER_02 29:12

And they shoot over the bow a gossamer thin little court. Attached to that is a slightly larger court. Attached to that is a slightly larger court. Attached to that is a slightly larger, and you and only by doing that are they able to get this massive one over the bow. And that should be a metaphor for you. You don't have to go, you know, for the trillion dollar hit first. That's right. What you have to go for is a break in your pattern. Right. A break that validates, a break that proves there really is a better way. There really is a faster way. There really is a safer way. There really is a higher and better way. And when you start doing it and you see meaningful results, and meaningful results can be a 10% improvement. Of course. It starts validating and you get excited about doing the next and the next. And you just keep progressing, just like shooting that over the bow. That was my metaphor.

SPEAKER_03 30:14

That's right. I love it. I love it. A little tiny rope pulls into this big 10,000-pound rope. Indeed. That's right. You get the little wins.

indset Wrap Up And Closing

SPEAKER_03 30:22

Strategic edge with Jay Abraham. That's why we love having you in here, because this is uh so many small business owners, medium-sized business owners, even large business owners we hear from that say, man. Jay brings the goods and we appreciate it.

SPEAKER_02 30:34

Thank you.

SPEAKER_03 30:35

So, you know, so much of what you talk about, and I know that everyone loves this about you, is it's a it boils down to a mindset. You know that just have a shift in your mindset, then all of these things can come to fruition, can't they?

SPEAKER_02 30:48

Yeah, and we call it the Abraham method, and it's really just a way of thinking and doing.

SPEAKER_03 30:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 30:52

And acting and transacting differently than everybody else. That's right. Because most people don't really understand highest and best use, they don't understand exponential performance, they don't understand how to question the logic and the basis behind what they've been doing. Yeah. They don't understand that theirs is not even close to necessarily the best way. And when you start really opening your mind, you're opening your success to, I mean, almost unimaginably vast because you start getting far more results, yield, clients, dollars, repeat. Yep. It's just really remarkable. And and that's been my I've been on a mission and a crusade to try to get that message across all my life.

SPEAKER_03 31:36

Yep, yep. And you're helping me, thank you. That's right. Well you've helped companies all over the world to succeed. So Jay Abraham, thank you so much. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 31:48

Thanks for watching. Exclusively on J F Night.