Why Human Connection Outperforms Automation | Jay Abraham

Business strategist and growth expert Jay Abraham shares how early adversity, cross-industry experience, and a hands-on entrepreneurial approach shaped his path to becoming one of the world’s leading business thinkers. In this first episode of Strategy Sessions, Abraham outlines practical strategies for uncovering hidden growth opportunities, creating sustainable revenue streams, and scaling businesses intelligently without relying on large budgets or conventional methods.

He emphasizes leveraging existing assets, applying ideas across industries, and focusing on trust, customer experience, and retention over short-term sales. Abraham also highlights the role of AI as a tool, not a strategy, and shows why human connection and differentiated experiences are increasingly key competitive advantages in today’s market.

Key discussion points:

• Identifying hidden assets and underutilized opportunities in your business
• Applying cross-industry strategies to achieve outsized results
• Why becoming a trusted advisor drives long-term profitability
• Designing customer experiences that encourage repeat business and referrals
• Using AI strategically while maintaining human judgment
• Prioritizing recurring revenue, retention, and human connection for sustainable growth

Transcript

Welcome And Jay’s Origin Story

Jim Fitzpatrick 0:13

Hi everyone, Jim Fitzpatrick. Thanks so much for joining me on what I think is a very, very exciting day. It is our first show for strategy sessions with Mr. Jay Abraham. Mr. Jay Abraham, thank you so much for joining us on the show today. Thank you, Jim. What a pleasure. Yes. So uh this is, I'm, as I mentioned, our first podcast for uh strategy sessions, which we are very excited about. But I think first we should uh get to know Jay Abraham a little bit for our listeners. So tell us the Jay Abraham story.

Jay Abraham 0:44

Uh it's interesting. All right, I'll go back in time and do the origin story quickly. So I got married the first time at age 18. I do not recommend it. We had two kids by 20, and I definitely don't recommend that. Not, I mean, I have wonderful children, but I wouldn't recommend it at that age. And I had no education, no negotiable talent, skill, ability, and I was anything but a trust fund baby. My dad gave us $200 when we got married, and that was all I had. And so I didn't have a great way of going into the market and adding value. And the only people that gave me opportunity, not salaries, but opportunity, were really interesting entrepreneurs who were very eclectic, and they would give me what is called earn, you eat what you kill. That means you make something happen, you get a piece, you don't, you waste your own time, and they wouldn't, they didn't care. So they also didn't care if I worked one minute or 18 hours a day just to make me money, you get your share, you don't, you know. So I always did five or six different things concurrently to make sure I could put groceries on the table and pay the rent. And as luck would have it, they were from totally different industries, never the same, fortuitously. After about 10, I made a very profound distinction that people in one industry do not have a clue how people in other industries think, act, transact business, market, sell, find their leads, convert them, business model. And I was able to take very common as dirt methodologies from industries I'd been in, combine them together and create hybrids, and then take them to industries I was in where everybody was pretty much doing the same thing the same way, and the people I did it for just blew up. We did IC Hot and it blew up. We did Entrepreneur Magazine and it blew up. I did 30 different financial newsletters and brokerage firms and they blew up. But not everyone thought I was brilliant, and I'm very probably I I got a decent IQ, but I was really the one-eyed man in the land of the blind. And I was the accidental tourist who was able to capitalize on what he had discovered. And then when I realized how powerful this concept that I started calling funnel vision versus tunnel vision was, I was on a mission, a crusade. I was unstoppable and learning everything I could about everything I could, meaning everything about every industry I could really experience on the marketing, the selling, the revenue generation, their competitive advantage, how they did it, what the key essence drivers were, how that could be universally adapted everywhere. And that was when I started many, many decades ago. And then fast forward over the this this period of time, I've traveled the world about 30 times. I've used to be in the in the seminar business all over Japan, China, UK, France, uh, everywhere.

Tony Robbins Partnership And Seminars

Jim Fitzpatrick 3:45

Let me just kind of jump in there. When you say the seminar business, you mean with some of the biggest names that we know, including Tony Robbins and others. Talk to us about that and your relationship with Tony. I mean, it's gone back some three decades, right?

Jay Abraham 3:58

Sure. It was it's very fascinating. So it it's interesting. When I first met Tony, he was only doing three things. He was doing uh personal development, motivation, a little bit of sales training, and he did his what's called his date with destiny, which was just an expanded version. And he had a lot of buyers, and I had a feeling, first of all, they came to me to help with a program he was not doing as well with, and I was able to give him a breakthrough so it got his attention, turned a marginal, uh, a marginal uh project into a very lucrative one. So now I got some credible, uh, you know, a predisposed uh positivity in his mind. So then basically I he and I started together. We did uh it's a fascinating story, and I'll give it to you if you want to share it with everybody. He he owed me a favor, and I knew him to be a fabulous interviewer. He humbles me, and I'm a good interviewer, but he's world-class. And I wanted him to interview me because I had had a body of work that was already pretty significant, and we'd done, you know, we've done $250 million of seminars around the country of the world at that time. That's a big one. So I had stature, but I never had anybody advocate why. What's the reason Jay was so unique? And he had the ability to do it. So he'd never really met me. I'd worked with his his uh president as CEO, but then we had an agreement to do a one-hour interview. I this is before the internet, so I sat down and gave him 40 very succinct, sinewy pages of key insight into my bodies of work. And I hoped he would even look at some of them. He was late. He was three hours late, because we were supposed to do it at 11 o'clock. We started at about 1.30, and it was supposed to be an hour. But when he sat down, I was vividly impressed. He didn't just make a few notes, he made notes on almost every line of every paragraph of every page, and they were profound. And what ensued was an interview that started right before 2 p.m. and didn't end until 3 a.m. Oh my gosh. We did something like 11, 12 hours of interviewing, and a fabulous interview came from it, which I'll be happy to share. You can give it to everybody. It's really profound, still very timely. But he and I became sort of uh mutual admirers of one another. Then I spent a lot of time. We I'd go to Fiji many times with him, and we spent time talking. Now, this is in the 80s, 90s, what sort of businesses, 91. 91, 92. Okay. And then I I started teaching him more deeply some of my methodology, and he started applying it, particularly my three ways to grow a business model, which is the essence of how you really create geometric performance increases. He started using it for his business, but he also started using it for his clients. You might remember he counseled the LA Kings the season that they won the Stanley Cup. Well, he used a derivative of my methodology. They isolated, and I don't, I'm not a hockey player, but they isolated every move that a hockey player could have in every position. And they said, if we can just make you 10% better at at this defense, 10% at this, you know, I don't know what they're all called, then the cumulative effect is going to be it's sort of like Moneyball.

Jim Fitzpatrick 7:19

Right.

Jay Abraham 7:19

But Moneyball figured it, if you never strike out, you're gonna you're gonna own the game. And and he did that with my methodology. It worked profoundly. He did it in his business. We became very, very good friends. I spoke for him a lot, and then we stopped because I stopped speaking, and I bumped him to again like a decade later. I was in Tokyo for a client, and he was in Tokyo doing a big gig. We got together, then we started every year having a day together. He and I do one day together. He, I, and his high-end group, they're called Platinum Partners. Pardon me, he's also got an even more, they're $85,000 a year. He also has a group that pays $150,000 to get together. He and I for about eight hours a day, in that day, excuse me, answer questions, solve problems, do interventions, mine opportunities, uh play positive, wretched havoc with people's mental paradigm, do paradigmectomies. And it's great fun. And I've been doing it for 10, 12 years with him, and it's uh very simulating because when I well, I should probably give you another part of the Tony story because it's pretty profound. After he gained a respect for me, I had a I had a hypothesis that I wanted to validate. I was still in the seminar business, and I thought, you got a million people approximately who have done, who have used your work. And I said, I bet a lot of them are successful entrepreneurs who made a lot of money and thought that making a lot of money was going to solve all their problems. Heaven would open, the angels would trumpet, permanent nirvana would befall them, and they realized it just multiplied their problems, and they were searching for more meaning, and that's why they came to you. He didn't really sense that at that time at that level, and I said, Let me prove it. So he gave me 20,000 of his best names that bought everything he had, which was very limited, so it didn't cost him anything. He wasn't he wasn't giving up opportunity costs because he sold them everything.

Jim Fitzpatrick 9:19

Yeah, sure.

Jay Abraham 9:20

I loved it because those are the best buyers. Went to buy everything. And you're thinking these could be table scraps, but at the end of the day. Well, here's what happened. We spent $10,000, this was in the year of direct mail, not internet, to s to mail. It was fifty cents apiece, to mail twenty thousand letters, and it generated nine million dollars of seminar attendees. Oh my gosh. And when he saw that, the light went on, and all of a sudden he got very serious about being in the business training business as well, and that became a very huge part of his business. He ended up doing $10,000 trainings for $3,000 people, $15,000 trainings for $1,000 people, and that was the source of the five or six hundred members he has and his $85,000. But it all started by proving sort of unintentionally to him that he has sitting, he was sitting on a gold mine. But that was the that was the genesis. And um to my credit, he has a great respect for me. He's been a great advocate. He's given me unhedged endorsements, and I've seen him to be a very, very he's a force of nature, very brilliant man.

Jim Fitzpatrick 10:27

Yeah, yeah, boy, that's for sure. And and as I said, your relationship goes back with him some 30 plus years.

Jay Abraham 10:33

Yeah, that's true.

Jim Fitzpatrick 10:34

I mean, you're still doing you're still on the platform with him today.

Jay Abraham 10:37

Yeah, but I only do that one. Well, I do sometimes a couple extra things for him, but it's just the one day a year he and I do together. It's right, it's it's uh a special event he does for his high-end people, and it's great fun. Occasionally we'll have a surprise. Two years ago I had Damon John show up as a surprise, and it was very well received, and we had all three of us on on uh it's really good. And I can get I can get you some footage from that if you want to.

Jim Fitzpatrick 11:03

Damon John, I should mention, is another client of yours. Damon John. I have advised him for about 12, 15 years. Wow, wow, that's pretty cool. So let's let's kind of jump right in here.

Hidden Assets And Untapped Profit

Jim Fitzpatrick 11:14

Um you you've discovered kind of the hidden assets principle in business. Talk to me about that.

Jay Abraham 11:20

Well, most people don't understand that almost every business is sitting on hidden assets, and these assets are not necessarily the kind you'd see on a balance sheet. Most of them are intangible. Uh they are sitting on I'll come back to it, they're sitting on hidden assets, overlook profit opportunities, underperforming revenue activities, underutilized relationships, and undervalued resources. All businesses, I don't care how large, how small. And the only reason they don't see it is they are all pretty much herd-oriented. They're all doing the same thing the same way, and they're all valuing everything they're doing and all the the components they're doing it with the same way. So for example, uh in the early days of athletes, I'm just using an analogy, athletes were valued as being worth very little. Then somebody said, well, you could be an endorser and make more for doing that. And then uh CAA decided you could, we could make a lot of money by going to corporations and selling them naming rights. And they found different different, I guess I'd call them ancillary opportunities that were like the tail wagging the dog.

Jim Fitzpatrick 12:36

Sure.

Jay Abraham 12:36

So in business, when you've done what I've done since I started, and I accidentally uh discovered it, I've worked with over 1,000 industries, and this is the scary part, 7,100 and last account, 34 sub-industries, and I've really worked with them. I haven't just taught them a uh a speech or a presentation. I've been on the front lines of capitalism, so I understand an enormous diversity of ways to sell, market, strategize, business models, source leads, convert them, monetize them, make money from them ethically when you have nothing else to sell. So I have a lot of knowledge that gives me the ability to look at a business and see opportunities and assets they don't. An asset can be, for example, you sell a product to an industry. You're very successful, you have a singular product. But what you really have is a trusted bond, a direct relationship with a decision maker, a buying influence who buys many more things within that range of categories. You can easily either create, partner, co-brand, or basically acquire on performance all kinds of other products that that industry and that decision maker who has trust for you is buying from someone else, put it through your distribution and take a relationship that has been worth X to you and make it worth 10X. That's just an example. Right.

Jim Fitzpatrick 14:14

Same thing with so that's a hidden asset. And there's so many businesses out there, to your point, that are sitting on opportunities like that that they don't even realize. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Jay Abraham 14:23

Yeah. Well, also, and then the hidden opportunities to go there. I mean, most people don't understand how much more performance you can get out of an ad, how much more performance you can get out of an email, how much per more performance you can get out of a landing page, how much more performance you can get out of a salesperson and a sales interaction. And it's profound. I can go into lots of examples, but when you understand that as I do, because you have observed it, you have analyzed it, you have codified it, and you can articulate it, and more importantly, you can translate it, apply it, and adapt it to almost any kind of business, you hurt for people who accept a fraction of a fraction of what opportunity, what time, what access to a market, what media, what salespeople, what prospects, even what buyers are worth to them because they don't know how much more they could command and demand from that activity, that opportunity, that access.

Jim Fitzpatrick 15:28

Right.

Preeminence And Trusted Advisor Mindset

Jim Fitzpatrick 15:29

Right.

Jay Abraham 15:29

That's Jay Abraham.

Jim Fitzpatrick 15:31

Uh I've heard you speak a lot about preeminence and uh why is being uh the preeminent provider in a particular market important? And and let me take it a step further and ask you um the the most trusted advisor you often say beats uh being the best marketer. So if you can address those two those two items.

Jay Abraham 15:52

So the so I created the strategy preeminence many years ago. I should give you the origin, first of all, because when you see the basis behind it, the answer will be very clear. So I have had many clients in my life, and I had one that at the time was the number one publishing entity in the financial market. Uh they since were sold, and they sold for $650 million like 25 or 30 years ago, which was significant. And uh they were three times uh larger than their closest competitor. They were about four times more profitable, and within that profit were fascinating um uh fascinating uh data. They had something like three times the loyalty factor, and subscription is how many years you subscribe and you upgrade to other subscriptions. They had many, many times more referrals. They had all the denominators that you would want. And we were doing work together, but I made an exchange with them. I offered them a half a million dollars of my services in exchange for the ability to spend a week interviewing everybody involved in what their secret sauce was.

Jim Fitzpatrick 17:09

Right.

Jay Abraham 17:10

And it turned out the guy running it was a former Bain partner who was very bright, and he created what I ended up calling the strategy of preeminence. I took a thousand pages of notes, I distilled it down, and in a nutshell, which not a nutshell, it takes about two hours to fully explain it, but in a nutshell, you start by saying we want our business to be seen, no matter whether we're high-end, low-end, mass, you know, business to business, luxury, doesn't matter. We want to be seen as the only viable solution they could turn to, the only viable source that makes any sense. We want to be the most trusted advisor for life, even if we're only selling them one time. In order to do that, the first thing you have to do is be willing to give advice, not information. Advice means I have to tell you what I think you should do. It's in your best interest. And sometimes it's not buying everything I'm selling. Sometimes it's not even buying what I'm selling. Sometimes it's not letting you buy less than you should, in less quantity, quality, combination, and frequency. And you've got to have that kind of a conviction to really give them your most trusted advice. You've got to basically be able to put into words what people want to get closer to or away from in a way that is result-oriented that they've never thought about before. And I have a mechanism that could be a whole podcast I can teach you. You've got to basically be seen as a leader. Every human being, me, you, Jim, we are silently begging to be led in various aspects, decisions, and progressions in our life with a caveat. We only want to be led by someone who we believe in our heart of hearts has our best interest ahead of their own. So you've got to be able to understand that you are a leader and it's all about trust and leadership. The other thing, and I can give you many more things that you want to do to be preeminent, but the next and the most important is most entrepreneurs, if they have passion, and that's not meant to be cynical, but most don't even have passion, and most aren't really entrepreneurs. If you want to go and talk about the difference between an entrepreneur and a proprietor, I can go there, and it's very interesting and it's very thought-provoking, and it's a little bit embarrassing to most people. But most entrepreneurs, I lost my train of thought because I'm ADD, so let me continue. Just one second. What were we talking about? Oh, I got it. Okay. If they have any passion at all, they fall in love with either their company, their product or service, their industry being the fastest growing. But when you become preeminence, I get you to fall in love with the clients you serve. And we call them clients for a very specific reason. People who refer to the people they do business with as customers, if they really understand the literal Webster's dictionary definition meaning, what you're saying to me when you call me a customer is that I am no better than a commodity. A customer, Webster says it, somebody who buys a commodity or a service. So if you say, hey, you're my customer, what you're really saying is I have no extra value beyond everyone else. I am not unique. I am lucky as heck that you're buying from me because I have no unique reason why you should. If you call me a client, if you look at the definition, a client is someone who is under the care, the protection, the well-being. It's a fiduciary concept. Even if you have to call them a customer, you should think of them as a client and should see your relationship transcending besides just transactional. Now, the last part of it, besides falling in law, it's two parts. You have three categories of clients. The first is obviously the people who pay you. The second are the people you pay. And the third, your your team members and your vendors. And you want to have the greatest, the greatest connection you can. You don't want to squeeze everything out of them. You want to develop and grow everything within them because human capital is the one area that almost no entrepreneur gets anywhere close to the fullest return or yield out of. So that's that. The last part of it, and I'm giving you the distilled, like the three minute, five minute version, is you want to learn how to live in a mindset where you see your product, service, people, company deployed in somebody's life forever. You have a dual interest. You're a great advocate, you're a great champion of entrepreneurship, but you're also very involved in. The automobile business. We talked about this earlier. If you were preeminent in the automobile business, you would have your salespeople and all your service people and all your interactions with all the people that interact with the clients see the fact that when you sell them a new car, you'd see that car serving them in a wonderful way for in their life. You'd see like a uh a van helping the family have all these safe experiences, all these wonderful, you know, uh activities with their kids, these vacations. If it was a new car for somebody who traveled a lot or to work, you'd see them have more safety. You've got to see your product or service deployed in people's lives. I can go on and on, but it's a very powerful concept. Sure, sure, to really take ownership of what the customer is going to be utilizing in the process. And your competitors don't think that way, so it's a rarefied strata of being that it evokes a whole different aura of connection between you and your buyer.

Entrepreneur Versus Proprietor Thinking

Jim Fitzpatrick 23:06

So let's go back for a second and talk about um your your vision and I should say your version, entrepreneur versus a proprietor. What do you see as a dedicated?

Jay Abraham 23:14

I'm gonna acknowledge attribution. It's not mine, it's an interpretive version of Peter Drucker's.

Jim Fitzpatrick 23:19

Okay.

Jay Abraham 23:20

He uses a very simple analogy which is laughable. He says a proprietor, he uses an example of a delicatessen. So you're gonna open a delicatessen, and I'm not uh accusing you, but if you were a proprietor, you would find a location that had a lot of other food service places, so you're you're in the jet stream. Yeah. Pardon me. You would open up a clean facility. It would have a you know, nice sign, you would walk in and there'd be clean, nice, smiling people. There would be basically a menu of the sandwiches, the soups, the salads that you had. There would most probably be a a glass case that had the meat in it and the bread. You would make an order and they'd have a clean table, you sit down, and uh it would be a transaction that had no memorabilia to it.

Jim Fitzpatrick 24:16

Yeah.

Jay Abraham 24:17

Uh it would be the proprietor was looking at a transaction. He or she got into the business to basically siphon oxygen out of out of the traffic that is in this food area. Right. It's not any noble cause that the food is not exactly. Yeah. And a true entrepreneur is focused on the experience. He or she understands they are playing a long game, not a short. So they would start by having the facade, the outside of their of their facility, be so interesting that it was engaging and it was it was welcoming. They might have a blower that was blowing the best fragrances of the meats or the freshly baked bread out to the street. When you walked in, it would be distinctive. The the uh You're making me hungry. I know. The uniforms, if they were uniforms that people were wearing, the team would be intriguing and thought-provoking and fun.

Jim Fitzpatrick 25:21

Right.

Jay Abraham 25:21

There would be a board that would describe everything with a proprietary name that was memorable, fun, and connoted something very, very, very unique and desirable. They wouldn't have mediocre meats. They'd have the best meats and they'd be stacked in a way where you're just couldn't, you're already, you're already salivating. They wouldn't buy you know average bread or cheap bread. They would buy bread that was so delectably unique that every time you bit into it, you couldn't wait to come back. They would have uh the settings be so comfortable and they would have their staff come over and they would have them say certain things they had tested that engage better, that bring smiles on your face. They would remind you at the end that they can't wait for you to come back. They are very strategic.

Jim Fitzpatrick 26:12

That's the differential. Right, right. And that and therein lies the the success between the two. Yeah, the proprietor might. The proprietor might make a buck and pay his rent. Yeah. Well, the entrepreneur might go on and sell a number of uh franchises based on this.

Jay Abraham 26:27

Well, the he the he or she is so much more one is a tactical short playing a short game if you want to use a golf analogy. The other is super strategic, it's playing a long game, and understands empathically what it means to be in the experience of the consumer. Sure, sure.

Leading AI With Human Judgment

Jim Fitzpatrick 26:44

Speaking of consumers and the relationship they have with their uh with business owners today. We see so much about AI. It's on every single article that that is out there, everybody is talking about how it's going to impact business today. Uh talk to us about um why human connection outperforms automation, even in 2025.

Jay Abraham 27:06

Well, I mean, uh I I just had a little bit of a conversation about that minutes ago. So right now, if you are a company that has access or has not doesn't have access, but but avail yourself of access to certain AI, you could have a short-term advantage. But sooner or later, everybody's gonna have all the same AI. They're gonna have you know $120 or $200 apps or tools or it doesn't matter. So the key is not gonna be the AI, it's gonna be how you it's always gonna be leadership. How do you lead it? How do you direct it? How do you instill in it a unique sense of relationship with whatever its goal is, the consumer, your, your, your, uh, your suppliers, your your people. And it's gonna always, always, always come down to human intelligence being able to utilize it in an inventive, unique, and superior way. And you can't you can't do that. I mean, if you go, if I if you and I go on, I don't care, chat GPT, Claude, Perplexity, any of them, we can put we can get a very, very good a very good theoretical, um, uh theoretical outcome that relative to a lot of people who don't use their brains very much is probably good. But it'll never be, I mean, when I get results from it, and I get some good results, it's because I hold its feet to the fire and may go ten iterations.

Jim Fitzpatrick 28:49

Okay.

Jay Abraham 28:50

I don't do what everyone else does and say, oh, this is great, thank you. I want to send it out.

Jim Fitzpatrick 28:53

Right.

Jay Abraham 28:53

I basically say, that's not very good. You need to do this. And the prompts are very my prompts are that long.

Jim Fitzpatrick 29:00

Yeah.

Jay Abraham 29:00

And they're very specific. I sent you as an example that uh manifesto of mine.

Jim Fitzpatrick 29:08

Right.

Jay Abraham 29:08

Uh if you read it, it's very good.

Jim Fitzpatrick 29:09

Yes, it is.

Jay Abraham 29:10

If you saw the first one it came out with that most people accept it was a piece of crap. And the only reason it was good is I had to educate it.

Jim Fitzpatrick 29:19

Right.

Jay Abraham 29:19

I had to recontextualize it. I had to redirect its thinking. I had to challenge it, and that was an intellectual human, and I got something great, but I didn't get something great if I left it do it itself. It it it it is it defaults to mediocrity, inspired mediocrity, but mediocrity. And if you want to play a mediocre game, it'll be great. But you can't, because everybody will be playing a mediocre game, and the people that will win are the people that have the ability to command it, and that is an intellectual function. It is not an automation function.

Jim Fitzpatrick 30:02

Right. I don't know. Well, it sounds like though you are an advocate of AI using the advocate of if it's done right.

Jay Abraham 30:10

I am an advocate of leading AI, not being led by AI. It's a very different concept. Yes. Using your intelligence and seeing it as the ultimate directable resource. Right. So I think if if you're gonna I I love SaaS services because there are two things. Number one, you sell them once, and if it's something that has some level of uh of relevance on a daily basis, you lock them in for years or for forever.

Jim Fitzpatrick 30:43

Scalability is a very good thing.

Jay Abraham 30:44

Scalability is almost instant. After your acquisition cost, you got a lot of allowable, what's called acquisition costs. Once you hit break-even, adding another person costs you almost nothing. So we have a client, just to give you an example, we six-time their business by showing them they were a SaaS-based uh safety training company that worked with trucking companies. They charged about $25,000 a year for their SaaS service, but the incremental cost to them, because they were far into profit, was about $1,000 to fulfill a $25,000, and the average client had stayed with them about seven years. So you got so the the odds are once you bring them in, they're going to be profitable over and over again. And I showed them that they could take that $24,000 differential, give it to an endorsing partner, somebody that already had access to trucking companies, and that was a high incentive. But every time they paid out the $24,000 on the $25,000 that cost them no lost cost, just that first year's profit, they were going to get six more years of $25,000. That's almost all profit. And the best thing about that business, they grew it six times by that. But also the value, if you're going to sell it, I mean, it it's it's it's higher value than almost any other kind of business because it's got predictable long-term earnings. Most businesses, even if they are very profitable today, if they are um if they are uh transactional, meaning they get a lot of business, but there's no certainty it will come back tomorrow, then it's valued much less than somebody that locks in every month. You either get the invoice or your credit card gets billed the $1,000 or the $500 or the $2,000. So yeah. Sure. I would say that would be one of them. Uh the other is and it it and it's really interesting. I still am very, very popular giving my advice because it is so uniquely predicated on all these hundreds of thousands of actual hours of firsthand experience. But general expertise is gonna get marginalized. You can ask a question of AI that will give you an answer. It's probably as good and more efficient and elegant than most mid-level uh consultants. So that I think that's gonna be marginalized. I think creativity is going to still be creative functions will still be very valuable, but you're gonna get a lot of enhancement from technology. Uh I think so I think people who are very astute, for example, I have a law firm that I help. Law firm is very impressive, but they have figured out that there's a certain category of of law that can be handled almost totally by uh by a secondary tier of people, and they don't need attorneys to do it, and it's very profitable. You're gonna need people who can come up with business models that take ethical but positive advantage of what I call arbitrage. Big gaps in in thinking that that a few people see. We talked about hidden assets, overlooked opportunities.

Jim Fitzpatrick 34:13

Right.

Jay Abraham 34:13

It's all that's just a form of of of conceptual arbitrage, isn't it? And and if you can arbitrage better than your competitor, you have advantage. But I have to think a little bit more. That question, come back to me next time we do one, and I'll give you a better answer.

Jim Fitzpatrick 34:27

Sure.

SaaS Growth Leverage And Arbitrage

Jim Fitzpatrick 34:28

You mentioned that your friend's got a franchise. Yeah. Um there's a lot of people that uh watch our broadcasts each day and visit our website and consume our content um that are thinking about franchising. Some of them have already jumped in. What is your take on franchising?

Jay Abraham 34:44

Well, I'll tell you the good and the bad. The bad is that franchisees are the most litigious group of people you'll ever meet. And that you can't make claims you can't support. Yeah. And they are the it and and a franchisee, the the great thing about a franchise is also these the franchisees suing the franchise or is that that's the thing. Yeah, but anything goes wrong.

Jim Fitzpatrick 35:07

Yeah.

Jay Abraham 35:08

So in a franchisee, if when you think about it, it's a very unique kind of an entrepreneur. In the automotive, it's more entrepreneurial. In most businesses, people are buying themselves a higher success probability job. Do you understand that? Sure, sure. So it's a whole different psychology.

Jim Fitzpatrick 35:26

Yeah, of course.

Jay Abraham 35:26

I think if you have a model that is working very well for you, and it would work very well a number of other cities, markets, countries, applications, but on your own, you don't have the motivation, the sophistication or the capitalization to really scale it up, franchising is great.

Jim Fitzpatrick 35:50

Yeah.

Jay Abraham 35:50

But franchising is treated very differently than licensing, very differently than company-owned. You've got to get every state's uh secretary of state, it's treated like a security. Yeah. You have to have an offering. It has enormous legal ramifications. But if you have a model that is very bulletproof in its in its performance attributes, if it can be really well articulated, codified, and and anybody, not just a brilliant person, and not just somebody who works 18 hours a day, but anybody who follows the system and and does it right in the right dynamic, will succeed, it's great. And franchise businesses are very desirable to private equity right now. There's a bunch of them. That's right. The client I'm telling you about, he has a restoration business. Before that, he had a very interesting, he had a uh he had a business that uh came in when there were uh when there were uh biological complications. Somebody died at a house and nobody found them, somebody killed themselves, there was a crime, and they cleaned it up. And they were, you know, they and that was a very unique thing. And he sold it to private equity because it was very unique. Wow. So yeah, I mean, if if you have a successful singular business, if you do it right, a year or two from today you could have uh a worldwide business, a nationwide business, a regional business, whatever you wanted it to be, and your wealth could be multiplied almost overnight by a you know an order of magnitude. So it's very good, but it's not uh there's a faction of companies that try to convince anybody they can franchise. Sure. And I have a client that bought into one of those, and when I found out what they paid and what they were promised, and how piece of cake easy, it's sort of like the the the the young Turks online that tell people you can make a million dollars in your underwear watching Oprah if you just follow their one little tactic. That's right. That's right.

Jim Fitzpatrick 37:56

So it's it's it's flipping houses or something. Yeah, look how easy it can be. No. Now the your comments are from kind of the franchise or side for those companies that say, hey, I can do it. If we bake a great cookie, let's go ahead and sell franchise. But what about the entrepreneur that says, I'm thinking about open you know, get it into business and I want to be self-employed, so I'm looking at franchises.

Jay Abraham 38:21

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: So I will challenge the definition. If if you're an entrepreneur that wants to get into a franchise, you don't want a single unit. You're somebody who really wants to go into that because you want to have an option. And that's where the money is. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, so there's two different things. Yeah. If you're somebody who wants a secure, predictable income capability and you can predictable. Yeah. Yeah. And predictability isn't guaranteed because you could be involved, you know, you could have a Kentucky fried chicken when when greasy fast food, high cholesterol, high fat is popular, and all of a sudden it isn't. So you've got to be a little careful about that. But if you're somebody that has come to a point in your career, you're retired, you're at a dead end, you know, uh your company closes, you get you get outplaced, uh, it could be very good, but you your creativity isn't going to be challenged.

Jim Fitzpatrick 39:15

Yeah. What about if you're what about if you're you're 30 years old and you're in a corporate job and you think, hey, my parents will will help me fund this, or I can take out a Nets C A loan and I want to open up a subway franchise. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Jay Abraham 39:29

I have a little bit of a skewed response. I don't like to do things that don't fulfill the heck out of me and don't challenge the world out of me, and I don't grow from. A lot of people don't want that. They're very happy if they get something that's going to make them $150,000 a year, and they just have to basically either come and do it eight hours or they have somebody else do it for them. I think you've got to get clear on what your end game is. I mean, if you could own, we had we we knew a guy, very interesting. He owned eight franchises, but he didn't do any of them. He had managers. One was a tune-up, and one was a break one, and I can't wait the other a salad. And but he was making a million dollars a year having fun. Yeah. Depends on how you want to uh not just use, but but how you see the franchise serving your short and long-term goals. As I said, if it's one typical. Now there are franchises that are huge and can make you a million dollars, but those are not the normal ones. Right. If you're talking about Yeah, you want to buy a subway, it's a lot of work for a very low yield. Doesn't mean it's not a good franchise, but you're gonna need a lot of subways and certain franchises that are labor intense and not uh and not um uh and the kind of labor is not highly trained or you know, or very sophisticated are a lot of management nightmares.

Jim Fitzpatrick 40:53

Yeah.

Jay Abraham 40:53

So I mean just a lot of people don't really understand how to evaluate opportunity.

Jim Fitzpatrick 40:59

Right.

Jay Abraham 40:59

I think franchises can be great for the right person for the right reason, and it can be great for a proprietor mentality, it can be great for an entrepreneur mentality, but the strategies, those two distinctly different people would would uh would apply are decisively different.

Jim Fitzpatrick 41:18

Yeah, for sure.

Franchising Pros Cons And Fit

Jim Fitzpatrick 41:19

Um as we as we look to uh 20 and uh 26, um what concerns do you have for for the business community out there? What headwinds do you see? What obviously there's a lot of uncertainty with tariffs and and the economy right now and inflation and you know the affordability factor, whether it be on housing or cars, it's got a lot of people very concerned. If you were a business owner today, and I know that you are a business owner, but uh if you were opening up a business or you you had a business today, what would be some of the concerns that you've got?

Jay Abraham 41:53

Well, the first one is i it I'm gonna have two or three categories concerned. My biggest concern is with the market, because the market today is polarized, and they're polarized in many ways. They're polarized because they don't have much attention, they don't have much loyalty, and they really most of them don't have much discrimination. They can do a lot of checking online, but it's not necessarily accurate because it can be gamed. They tend to not be they're they're their their concept of value-based is normally it's it's denominated in in uh in price. They're not thinking about all the intangibles. We were talking about a car dealer earlier, and you were telling me people don't realize they bring about 3 percent to the bottom line.

Jim Fitzpatrick 42:44

That's right.

Jay Abraham 42:44

And uh and the consumer doesn't want them really to be even do that. They like them to lose money, and they don't understand that unless you allow somebody a fair profit, you can't really provide the service. So you're gonna have a number of very big, probably online entities that are gonna dominate a lot of categories, and they're not gonna give you good service. Right now, I mean if you try to call somebody that's a big company, you end up you're on you're on hold for 30 minutes, you get somebody not demeaning um uh other countries, but somebody other country, there's a delayed react reaction in the conversation, they don't understand, they have to read their their uh their cheat sheet. And they can't they're not authorized to do anything if you want to talk to uh a supervisor, they can't do it because they don't have a supervisor, they're only one.

Jim Fitzpatrick 43:36

These are these are you're talking about some of the biggest point of the city.

Jay Abraham 43:38

I've done American Express, and that's happened. I've done it.

Jim Fitzpatrick 43:41

Delta Airline.

Jay Abraham 43:42

Yeah. And and you go, well, if that's where it's going, I think that the concept of service is going to be marginalized like you can't believe. Right. In in in uh deference towards efficiency, effectiveness, and profitability, I think that's a good thing. I think the consumer is going to end up regretting the fact that they have basically abandoned value. I mean, not just value in terms of low price, but all the other intangibles that are necessary to render. I think, you know, I don't want to buy something and have to put it together. I don't want to have to figure out how to order my breakfast on a QR code at a hotel. I don't want to do that.

Jim Fitzpatrick 44:28

It's very popular now.

Jay Abraham 44:29

Yeah. But I mean, but there's a certain section that doesn't want that. Maybe everybody loves it. Young people.

Jim Fitzpatrick 44:34

All right, what about when you go into the grocery stores? Are you using the automated checkpoint?

Jay Abraham 44:38

We've abandoned two chains in deference to a more expensive one because I like human interaction. I don't want to be if I mean and and there's a fascinating other side. Everyone wants you to pay as a the flip. They want you to give them a tip when they just do what they're paid for.

Jim Fitzpatrick 44:54

The tip thing isn't a we could do a whole show on it. Yeah, it's it's ludicrous. Unbelievable.

Jay Abraham 44:58

Yeah. I mean, it's just mandatory. You want to give them a tip for this, you want to give them a tip for that.

Jim Fitzpatrick 45:01

I mean, it's fast food places where you go in. You're like, what do I'm what you're not delivering it to my table?

Jay Abraham 45:06

It's not my problem that your business can't operate paying a fair wage to somebody else. That doesn't mean I'm not empathic. It's just why am I the why am I the government bailing them out?

Jim Fitzpatrick 45:17

That's right. And I love when they say to you, you know, I'm going to flip the screen around and you got to answer a couple of questions. I don't want to answer any questions. I just want to pay the bill and be done.

Jay Abraham 45:27

And yeah, exactly right. I had the urge for the first time in a ton of years to have a Big Mac.

Jim Fitzpatrick 45:35

Yeah.

Jay Abraham 45:35

I went to a local McDonald's and there was no menu. And I had to go onto a screen. And I had to fight someone to tell me what you know things cost and what are you saying there was nobody behind the counter either? Well, there was some No, they really weren't. They were out doing things.

Jim Fitzpatrick 45:54

There was no normal Because you could order it right now.

Jay Abraham 45:57

And I finally got it done manually, but it was like kicking and screaming. And I said, I don't want to have to work that hard to pay you money to eat.

Jim Fitzpatrick 46:06

That's right. But I will say that corporate America is now training all of us consumers to do just that. Well that's it. Of course. Well, I went to a uh public supermarket last night and I noticed that there's all of these people that are waiting on one line that's open. Okay, with a with a with a cashier. And meanwhile, they're trying to get trying to herd you over to the automated ones. Exactly. Well, that's what happened. And they say, oh, so now everybody self-serve. Maybe with the exception of New Jersey, right?

Jay Abraham 46:39

Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. We we live in a very affluent area. There are three groceries there. There's one that would be more down market. Still, it's not a bad grocery, it's more down market. There's one that's mid-market, and there's one that's much more affluent. The down market does that. They have everybody trying, they have one the busiest time there's one counter with or one cashier, and then they've got all their people that could be working that standing trying to help you learn how to do that. They're training you. They're training us. And we we we went to the next one. The next one started doing more. Now we go to the one where you can't even do it that way. You have to do it with a cashier.

Jim Fitzpatrick 47:24

Now, with the now, from a business owner's standpoint, and and to hold um, you know, to kind of play not the devil's advocate, but the advocate of the business owner that is now implementing this automation in their store. Is this the future? I mean, is is this going to allow business owners to do more on less because of yes and no.

Jay Abraham 47:45

Yes and no. I if you're going to deal with the mass segment of the audience, yes. If you want to always own a unique niche, no. Right. There's always going to be a niche of markets that want to be acknowledged, served, and interacted with with a human being.

Jim Fitzpatrick 48:00

There's always that person that wants to stay at the Ritz-Carlton for that reason. Yeah. Right. And pay a little extra.

Jay Abraham 48:06

I think I was telling you the story that I got lost in my hotel the other night. Right. I was on the 25th floor and I couldn't find my room. It was very bizarre. Right. And so I I I went online, got the phone number, called it. It was somebody in India or the Philippines.

Jim Fitzpatrick 48:21

I was not going to be able to help you.

Jay Abraham 48:22

Every time I'd ask a question, there was a delay, and then it was this broken distance, and they had no they and they kept saying, I am authorized to book your reservation.

Jim Fitzpatrick 48:31

And you're thinking you're calling to the front desk to try to.

Jay Abraham 48:33

Yeah, because that's what he gave me. Right. And I'm saying, I'm not trying to get, I'm trying to find out how to find my room. And they kept, yes, I am an authorized. Where do you want to? And they just keep coming back to the rhetoric. Wow, that's frustrating. I guess what what a lot of big corporations are trying to get you to do is accept uh not just mediocrity, but accept soup I call it veneer superficiality. Yeah. And say, okay, that's how we have to do business. Right. It isn't how you have to. There's always going to be somebody who realizes that everybody doesn't want that. But you know, the majority will will do it because we are we have a herd mentality.

Jim Fitzpatrick 49:13

That's right.

Jay Abraham 49:14

Because we go, I guess we have to. You don't have to, you have free will.

Jim Fitzpatrick 49:17

That's right.

Jay Abraham 49:18

I appreciate what it takes to render not just just um transactional value, but experiential value. And when you deny a business that that economic capability, you're really denying yourself uh a significant part of the outcome, I think.

Jim Fitzpatrick 49:41

I would agree.

Jay Abraham 49:42

Yeah.

Jim Fitzpatrick 49:42

I would agree.

Jay Abraham 49:43

But yeah, I mean it's it's it's it'd be interesting. Uh in subsequent interactions, ask me, because we'll watch how it plays out in the first part of the year. Because, you know, the the thing about technology is it goes faster and faster, it compounds and compounds, and there'll be a lot of changes. I mean, right now it's fascinating. Uh everyone's loving AI, but everyone's getting laid off too, aren't they?

Jim Fitzpatrick 50:05

Yes, they are.

Jay Abraham 50:06

Yeah, and all of a sudden you're gonna you're gonna realize that as much as you celebrated how cool it is, yeah, you're the job, the job that's gone may be yours. And and the challenge is when that happens, which is inevitable, if you don't have the fluidity, the the flexibility, the agility, and the and the mental capability to reset yourself, it's gonna be it'll be it'll be a bloodbath.

Jim Fitzpatrick 50:32

That's right. That's right.

2026 Headwinds Service And Automation

Jim Fitzpatrick 50:34

Strategy sessions with Mr. Jay Abraham. Thank you so much for bringing me on the show. This has been great. This is our first show. Yes, there'll be there'll be many more to come, and uh I can't tell you uh how excited we are to have you uh in the ASPN family. So thank you so much. Thanks.