How Cross-Industry Strategies Unlock Competitive Advantage | Jay Abraham

Business strategist and growth expert Jay Abraham joins host Jim Fitzpatrick on Strategic Edge to explain how breakthrough growth often comes from looking outside your own industry. Abraham demonstrates that the most meaningful business innovations arise when leaders borrow, adapt, and refine strategies proven in other sectors rather than relying solely on conventional practices.

He emphasizes the importance of “funnel vision”—examining adjacent industries, market leaders, and unrelated fields—to uncover new revenue opportunities, optimize operations, and strengthen partnerships. Abraham also discusses how incremental improvements, structured learning, and deliberate exposure to unfamiliar business models can compound into sustainable, high-margin growth.

Key discussion points:

• Using cross-industry strategies to uncover untapped growth opportunities
• The difference between tunnel vision and funnel vision in business strategy
• Applying incremental improvements to revenue systems and operational efficiency
• Leveraging partnerships as an underused growth lever
• Structured learning and iterative thinking to multiply insights
• Maintaining passion, purpose, and curiosity for long-term relevance and growth

Transcript

Welcome And The Big Question

Jim Fitzpatrick 0:33

Jay Abraham, welcome back to the Strategic Edge. Thank you so much for joining us for a lot of people. It's a pleasure. Thank you. Our viewers are getting so much out of this series and so much out of your uh content and the information that you're sharing with us here on the show. So thanks again. Let's talk today about borrowing ideas from other industries. I know you work with a thousand plus industries out there. What mindset or thinking framework do you use to immediately identify breakthrough opportunities in any business?

Jay Abraham 1:02

I I always take your question and I have the uh probably annoying habit of of modifying it and and doing a little preemptive intervention. And why don't I tell you how I, before I answer the question, my career and how I discovered the answer, and then I'll answer it. So I think I told you in one of the other interviews, I got started very young. I had no formal training. The only people that would give me opportunity were crazy entrepreneurs who would let me eat what I killed, meaning you only get paid on performance. And I would always do five or six things, always from different industries. After about ten different industry exposures, I realized that people in this industry didn't have a clue how this industry thought, marketed, strategized, you know, distributed, uh advertised anything. And I was able to take common as dirt concepts from these industries I'd been in, combine them, take it to this, and they would blow up. IC Hot blew up, entrepreneur blew up, the newsletter businesses blew up, and everybody thought I was brilliant.

Why Outsiders Create Breakthroughs

Jay Abraham 2:10

And I was really, frankly, nothing more than the one-eyed man in the land of the blind. I mean, when I very first got started, I was a plebeian journeyman trainee in the mail order business. Okay. But the mail order business was very disciplined back in the 70s and the 80s. They understood testing, variability, allowable acquisition costs, lifetime value, uh uh risk reversal, bonusing, uh back end, upsell, downsell before anyone else. Sure. And I just took it from direct mail and marketing and mail order to brick and mortar, and everyone thought I was brilliant. So these two things converged, and I realized that true breakthroughs don't come from within the industry, they come from without. And that was a realization, but it was just a a ha with no substance. Then I created a concept I called funnel vision versus tunnel vision. But then I started doing the studies. And if you ask me to do it, I think we have a whole volume of 500 examples that I researched, but I started realizing that some of the greatest transformative early and late uh breakthroughs came from other industries. Fiber optics transformed telecommunication. Didn't come from telecommunication, came from aerospace and was borrowed. Federal Express created a whole industry by borrowing what's called the hub and spoke check clearing process that the Federal Reserve Bank does, so they get checks cleared at 9 a.m. so people can't bounce checks. Sure. So when I realized all these things, I was on a mission to learn it all. So and I created two parallel universes. One is calling borrowing from billions, and the other is called modeling for millions. Okay. Billions, millions. And so the concept is two things. And I and I find this really amazing. So I'm a uh US SMB somewhere. Let's say you're operating in a city or a region or a market. Okay. First thing I would say is who's who's killing it somewhere else? Do you know what they're doing? Have you studied their marketing? Have you contacted them? And if they don't want to basically come into your market, ask if you could license their advertising, their model, their sales training? No. Okay, I say, okay, what other related industries are there? So let's say you are an electrical uh uh electrical product distributor. Right. Okay, so you do electrical product distributing, see who else is bigger, better, how they sell, how they do it, but you'd also say, well, maybe if you get a plumbing

Funnel Vision Over Tunnel Vision

Jay Abraham 4:55

supplier, let's see what they do. Let's and so I start within derivatives of the industry, then I go wild.

Jim Fitzpatrick 5:01

Right.

Jay Abraham 5:01

Then I go wild. Then I say, okay, how is this industry revenue generating? I call this revenue generation, revenue system optimization. You look at what they're doing and then you question it.

Jim Fitzpatrick 5:15

Yeah.

Jay Abraham 5:15

You say, what else, how many other ways could you be doing it?

Jim Fitzpatrick 5:18

Right.

Jay Abraham 5:18

And it's sort of a it's uh an iterative and a and a um, what do you call it when it keeps evolving? I don't know what the right word would be, but that's sort of the process I use. I don't know if that's too abstract.

Jim Fitzpatrick 5:30

No, no, no. It it's exactly right. So when you when you look at these businesses and you you look at these other industries, it must be somewhat frustrating, first of all, because you're sitting you're realizing that these industries can learn from one another.

Jay Abraham 5:43

Absolutely.

Jim Fitzpatrick 5:44

But oftentimes, as as you know, entrepreneurs don't look outside their industries for this.

Jay Abraham 5:48

But I'll tell you a process I used to do, and it was profoundly uh illustrative, transformative, and to me fascinating because I always like to experiment. So I used to do these very, very expensive and very long 86-hour seminars. They would take five, six days. Yeah. And they were broken into 90-minute uh components which would address one key principle. Okay. Three ways to grow a business, power parthenon, strategy preeminence, nine drivers of X. I have all these concepts. At the end of that, I would stop and we would spend a half hour having the approximate 800 people who were attending go around their tables and each share one very scenario-specific interpretive application that each person had come up with. Now, this is very interesting. If 800 people hear the same thing, you're gonna have 800 different interpretations. Nobody has the same uh history, nobody has the same values, nobody lived the same life, nobody even defines things the same way. So then we would have each table vote on the most universal insight that one of the members had that would be applicable to anybody in any industry, and then they would stand up and I uh uh they would have a a chairman who would present at each table, and that was pretty profound because you'd get maybe 30 different interpretations that were the culmination of 800 interpretations. And then I would do another round, I called it fractal learning, and then I'd ask people what they learned from that and to come up with new ideas, and it was very iterative but very exponential in learning. But I think you need to force yourself to travel outside your comfort zone if you think about it. For sure. Everybody that's watching has traveled somewhere. They've either traveled outside their city, their state, uh the continent, you know, the world, whatever. Every time you travel somewhere else, it broadens your mind. You see different geographies, topographies, uh religious mores, uh you see different clothing, different temperature, everything. That's

Fractal Learning And Forced Curiosity

Jay Abraham 8:05

right. And so traveling outside your business, your industry does the same. I try to get people to do things that will shock them into expansive awareness. When we used to do the seminars, we would go to the bookstores when they existed, and we'd buy, if we if it was a some of our smaller seminars would have a thousand people, the bigger ones had less because they're more expensive, and we'd buy a thousand out of uh close out books that were nonfiction. So they could be anything from hobbies, business, uh, sports, it didn't matter. Then after about the second day of a five-day event, when we got to know you, my staff would get to know you, we'd find out what your hobbies are. You like boating, you like sports.

Jim Fitzpatrick 8:50

Golf. Yeah.

Jay Abraham 8:51

So I would give you a book or a magazine on macro A or cake decorating, and I'd make you go for two hours, read either two chapters or two articles, and come back to your table and find at least one actual application that you could extrapolate, that you could adapt or adopt. Sure. And everybody did. Yeah. And that was pretty profound because it took you out of your comfort zone. I try to get people, if they live like here, I'm using the word like, which I don't like. If you lived in Atlanta, I would say go every weekend or evening when you have time to any of a number of hotels that have events going on. I'm not talking about parties, I'm talking about they have seminars, they have workshops, they have networking. Yep. And I and walk them and ask if you can sit in and observe because it'll blow your mind. Go to all your friends who do not work in the same industry or the same capacity, interview them, and then ask them to give you all the junk mail they get, all the you know, forward all the the you know the the ads they see, and it'll blow your mind. We talked in another session about grow or die. Yeah. Growing or dying linear is sort of dying. Yeah. But growing or dying in in a an expansive way where you you transcend the limitations of your very, very restrictive industry is where breakthroughs come from. Absolutely. I don't know if that explains it.

Jim Fitzpatrick 10:24

It does, and and but entrepreneurs, uh if they're if they've got a service, they're building a widget, they're uh you know doing their thing, they're not open to that often, right? To say let's look at other industries. They're not open to it at all things that you were just talking about.

Jay Abraham 10:39

I'm i I am benevolently incredulous all the time at how hard people make the the the concept of explosive growth. Because it's really, as as I said, it's much easier than you think.

Jim Fitzpatrick 10:54

Right.

Jay Abraham 10:54

Everyone's sitting on this gold mined, but they just and when you are able to do things, I mean, when you think about it, some of these other industries, some of these other companies in your industry outside

SMB Blind Spots And Grow Or Die

Jay Abraham 11:10

your competitive market, they've spent years, millions perfecting these things. It is the most hilarious thing. I have a group that I work with in Japan. There's about 3,500 uh SMBs, not dissimilar to the people that uh that that use our uh platform here. And every time they come up with a question about their business, I say, have you gone to the United States? Have you looked at the websites of the top performing? Have you basically modeled any of their things? Have you called any of them and seen? I mean, you could knock them off, I guess, but if you wanted to have integrity, you could pay them a nominal amount to use their stuff. No. Will you do that? Yes. Do they do it? No. And I'm thinking, why recreate the wheel if somebody else has figured it out at enormous effort, experimentation, and expense?

Jim Fitzpatrick 12:01

That's right. It's ludicrous. That's right. That's right. And we can learn so much from other industries. I mean, there's it's never-ending, right? I mean, what you just described, uh entrepreneurs and SMBs should be doing this on an ongoing basis.

Jay Abraham 12:14

Yeah, I mean, you're looking for you're looking for breakthroughs, but but breakthroughs don't have to be tectonic. They don't have to be dangerous and costly. Right. You can get a breakthrough in every facet, whether it's revenue generation, operation, cash flow management, inventory management. I mean, it it it f I mean we have a friend, and and I I want to get him onto your platform, and he is the World Authority on Operational Efficiency. He can teach any entrepreneur and any entrepreneur's team how to add five hours a week to their uh to their available productive time to use for higher and better applications. Well, if you had 10 or 20 or 50 or even three people and you got an extra five hours a week for each one of them that could be used for higher yielding things, right, all things being equal in a competitive world, that's an advantage. No question about that. It's only one little thing.

Jim Fitzpatrick 13:12

Right, right.

Jay Abraham 13:12

Pretty profound.

Jim Fitzpatrick 13:13

Yeah, yeah. There's there's no question about it. And yet SMBs, uh to your point, are sitting on this, and and the execution of it is very, very poor.

Jay Abraham 13:23

It it um I I have uh a quote and I haven't used it for years. Either you work harder for your business or you figure out how to make the business work harder for you. Yeah. One or the other. Right. Why not build an asset that is going to multiply your net worth, all things being equal while you're multiplying your income?

Jim Fitzpatrick 13:42

Sure. How many times have we seen a situation where somebody's got a business for 10, 15 years, they sell the business to somebody that's brand new now to that business, and the business explodes. Yeah. And and and that, you know, that first owner says, How did that happen? You know, I I was doing a million dollars a year, two million a year, that guy's doing five million a year with the same business.

Jay Abraham 14:02

Do you want to know why people aren't great entrepreneurs? Yes. Well, first of all, they don't really know what greatness looks like in terms of conduct, performance, mindset, uh actions, and they don't go to any effort to try to model people that are great in different capacities, whether it's strategy, business model, leadership, uh innovation. If they do, they don't know how to implement and actuate it themselves. If they get that far, usually the first time you do anything, it's very much like a little baby learning to walk, talk, poop, eat, ride a bike. Well, a little baby isn't going to ride a bike, but a little bit older one. Sure. They're terrible. And when most people who've never entered a world of unfamiliarity have a embarrassing setback, they they recoil right back to status quo. Right. But greatness should be, I believe that every human being is programmed in their DNA to want to be great. You know, you don't want to be a pathetic worker. You don't want to be a mediocre CEO leader. You don't want to basically be a salesperson who who dramatically underperforms your capacity. You don't come on Monday morning and say to yourself, self, I'm going to work my ass off, but I'm going to underperform and be mediocre.

Jim Fitzpatrick 15:27

That's right.

Jay Abraham 15:28

But most people are. And that's so ironic to me when with a well, if you can extricate yourself, no one else is going to do it for you. I mean, I can talk to you, they can hear it, it can be expire inspiring, but no one else will extricate you from the morass than you.

Jim Fitzpatrick 15:46

That's right. That's right.

Jay Abraham 15:47

And there's that wonderful phrase, it is yours to lose.

Jim Fitzpatrick 15:51

That's right. Always. Yeah, yeah. You're either your own worst enemy or your own greatest asset, right?

Jay Abraham 15:57

And and and no one else is going to do it for you. You can have all the mentors, you can engage me, and but if you don't do it, if it doesn't shift your your worldview, your business worldview, it's moot.

Jim Fitzpatrick 16:10

So the companies that we see out there and the leaders that we see uh leading these companies, they've actually done it. They've they they're the ones that you look at and you say, okay, you know, this this particular company is knocking the cover off the ball, the Starbucks story. I mean, it's a coffee shop at the end of the day, right? They've done a great job with it.

Jay Abraham 16:28

Learning from everybody.

10x Profit Without A Moonshot

Jay Abraham 16:30

Right. If you're not constantly opening your mind, internally and externally, yeah, for breakthrough thinking.

Jim Fitzpatrick 16:36

Yep.

Jay Abraham 16:36

And then if you don't also realize that the breakthroughs most people think about are complex, expensive. Well, let me give you a perspective. Everyone for years was talking about this 10x moonshot. 10x moonshot, 10x. I can tell you people, but I won't name names. But what they didn't tell you is the implication is it's a top-line activity. The other implement implication is it was technology driven. So technology-driven, big breakthrough. You're gonna have to find experts who are very expensive, who've never worked in your industry, never worked together. You're gonna have to find the right uh the right initiative to make sure that it's gonna get you somewhere. It's gonna take longer, cost more, it's gonna be like literally building your own house. Right. You're gonna have to fund it either from cash flow, from borrowing, or from diluting your your your ownership. When it's done, it may or may not work. You're gonna have to concurrently keep your normal business, your normal team, then you're gonna have to pay to retrain them, or you're gonna have to rehire. Right. And it's expensive and it's dangerous and uncertain and it's speculative. But a 10x bottom line costs nothing. It's safe, it's easy, it's just shifting, and all that all that enhanced profitability, those profit explosions can be used to finance the bigger thing without worrying about the downside. But people don't think that way because they're taught 10x top line.

Jim Fitzpatrick 18:06

That's that makes no sense. Right. Right. Sometimes you get 10x the top line and you can go further into the hole uh on the bottom line. Exactly right. I mean, we see that all the time.

Jay Abraham 18:16

I talk to people, this is another thing entrepreneurs don't understand. If you ask them what's it cost you to service a buyer or a sale, what's the product cost you to sell? They will take their overhead and divide it by whatever number of products they have historically sold, and that's the number. But I'll say, no, that's not really the question. What does it cost you incrementally to sell one more? Not very much. No. About so that's the reason why I think I said it in another um another uh discussion we had that 2,000 corporations right now get 20% of their revenue from partnerships, but 40% of their profit. Wow. Because that incremental sale is it doesn't matter

Partnerships And Incremental Cost Thinking

Jay Abraham 19:00

if you're giving up a portion, it's newfound, it's bottom line, you're until you have to add a lot more overhead, it's just surplus profit. Yeah, it's found. And little and medium entrepreneurs don't think that way. If I say, okay, we're gonna set up all these partnerships and you're gonna share revenue, they'll go, I can't do that. And I'll go, why? If you have a product or service you can create an infinite amount of and you have underutilized capacity, and even if you don't, when you realize what does it cost to add, you know, more sales, add more capacity, and as long as that cost is less than the incremental gain. By the way, I was gonna tell you something in another interview, and I'll tell you now. I have a way you can buy somebody's company and pay them two or three times market and make out like a bandit. Let's hear it. So most people, when they're trying to buy a business that is on the downturn, they'll just negotiate like mad with it. And you and the and the owner's probably already in trouble. He or she may not even be drawing a salary, they got all these leases and stuff, and they and they're just sort of holding on for dear life.

Jim Fitzpatrick 20:11

Sure, sure.

Jay Abraham 20:11

But if they have things that would benefit you, buyers, salespeople, products, services, brand, phone number, whatever it is, you can say to them, I'll tell you what, I will pay you, let's say the business as it is is on the downturn, it's worth $500,000.

Jim Fitzpatrick 20:32

Right.

Jay Abraham 20:32

I'll pay you a million and a half, but I'll pay you at the rate of 50% of the profit I gain by taking over your assets, integrating them into my business, liquidating everything I can. If you've got a long-term lease, I'll subsidize the shortfall and we'll release it. We'll sell off your uh your equipment, or if it's not, we'll figure out how to give it to somebody else and pay the dis the shortfall, and we'll just take a loss on it, and I will pay you every month more for doing nothing than you're making now for trying to keep it alive. And when you consolidate it, all of a sudden, you know, the economies of scale, and you've already got your fixed overhead. You get rid of their billing, you get rid of their this, you get rid of their that. It's great. We also, and this is a very edgy concept, we have many times gone to an industry to buy businesses, and the owner was had a very lofty perception of what it was worth. But the owner started out being the everything. He or she was the salesperson, they were the manager, they were the buyer, they were the customer service. But then as they got successful, they went to their ivory tower, yeah, and they don't even have a direct relationship with the clients. And the ones that do are their salespeople. And you can hire the salespeople for a fraction, you can give them bonuses that are deferred and only paid if their book of business comes.

Buying Growth Through Smart Acquisitions

Jay Abraham 22:00

With them and stays, and as long as they don't have a uh non-compete, you can buy 80 or 90 percent of the business for 3% of what you'd have to buy it for. That's interesting, isn't it? That is very interesting. And no one thinks that way. Yeah, otherwise, isn't that faster? In COVID, we did that all day long. We were trying to buy logistics companies, and they were just I don't want to use the negative vulgar word, but they were the D word.

Jim Fitzpatrick 22:23

Yeah.

Jay Abraham 22:24

And we said, okay, let's take a look at who really controls all the accounts, and they were the salespeople. Yeah. So we we bought the salespeople. Wow. And most of them didn't have non-compete. Right, right. And they had relationships with all the clients, and we gave them a slightly higher base, but a huge bonus deferred for a year to make sure that their book stayed with them. Sure. But that bonus and the and and the increase was a pittance of what we would have had to pay for the business itself.

Jim Fitzpatrick 22:54

Of course.

Jay Abraham 22:54

People don't think that way.

Jim Fitzpatrick 22:55

Wow.

Jay Abraham 22:56

I know.

Jim Fitzpatrick 22:56

That's that's interesting. That's a breakthrough right there. Well, it's just it's it's thinking another way to look at your business.

Jay Abraham 23:02

Yeah. We were talking about this concept I'm evolving that I'm calling super logic. People think I'm a nonlinear thinker, and I don't believe that. I think I'm a super logical thinker. I just understand correlations, implications,

Super Logic And Closing Thoughts

Jay Abraham 23:15

and how to connect dots. Right.

Jim Fitzpatrick 23:17

With an emphasis on execution.

Jay Abraham 23:19

Absolutely. Because you're just useless.

Jim Fitzpatrick 23:21

As you pointed out, so many people they know they know a lot of this stuff. And then when they if they don't know it, they learn it.

Jay Abraham 23:28

Absolutely.

Jim Fitzpatrick 23:28

And then they don't do it. To shape. And that that's a shame.

Jay Abraham 23:31

Yes.

Jim Fitzpatrick 23:31

Yeah. Jay Abraham, once again, thank you so much for joining us. You're very welcome. My pleasure. As I said, I can't wait for the next series or the next episode in our series. I know our viewers are getting so much out of it. So thank you.

Jay Abraham 23:43

You're very welcome. Thanks.

Speaker 23:48

Thanks for watching Strategic Edge with Jay Abraham, exclusively on ASBN.