Multipliers vs Diminishers in Business Leadership | Jay Abraham

On today’s episode of Strategic Edge, business strategist and growth expert Jay Abraham explores the concept of leadership multipliers versus diminishers. Abraham explains how leaders can amplify value, trust, and human capital—or unintentionally reduce them—shaping whether a business thrives or merely survives. He shares practical frameworks for assessing leadership impact and implementing strategies that expand influence, revenue, and long-term growth.

Abraham emphasizes that multipliers cultivate loyalty, optimize team performance, and treat business as a strategic, competitive sport. They focus on consultative selling, ongoing skill development, relational trust, and holistic integration across strategy, operations, partnerships, and distribution. Conversely, diminishers rely on transactional approaches, rigid practices, and superficial training, limiting opportunities and competitive advantage. By prioritizing outcomes over products and continuously experimenting with incremental improvements, multipliers create compounding value for employees, clients, and partners.

Key discussion points:

• Distinguishing multipliers from diminishers in leadership and business impact
• Expanding human and relational capital to increase productivity and influence
• Integrating strategy, business model, distribution, and partnerships for maximum effect
• Building trust and authority to drive measurable performance gains
• Continuous experimentation and incremental innovation as a growth strategy
• Focusing on outcomes and value creation rather than transactional results

Transcript

Welcome And The Core Question

Jim Fitzpatrick 0:32

Jay Abraham, thank you so much again for spending so much time with us here at the show at the uh strategic edge with Jay Abraham. We're getting so many great uh comments about you being on our network. So we're so grateful that uh you've given us all of this time. And so I want to talk to you today about the multiplier versus the diminisher mindset, which I I think you know a little something about, right? So I do talk to us about that.

Jay Abraham 0:56

Well, let's start with um uh I think it's physics. You either expand or you contract. You can't stay constant.

Grow Or Die Mindset

Jim Fitzpatrick 1:04

Right.

Jay Abraham 1:04

So take that and extrapolate. It you either grow or you die as a business, as a human being, as an entity, as a relationship, as a partnership, and it can be a business partnership, a marital partnership, a friendship. You in business, you either multiply or you diminish, and it means a number of things. It means that as a leader, you're constantly growing your understanding of leverage points that are ethically going to improve your performance, the entity's performance, and all your team's performance. It means that you are going to grow them. You're going to develop them. You're not going to try to squeeze everything out of them, you're going to try to grow everything within them because very frankly, we talk about capital, we talk about marketing, we talk about supply chain, but the biggest underutilized asset you can ever have is human capital.

Jim Fitzpatrick 2:04

Yeah.

Jay Abraham 2:04

People don't realize I can share with you, and I'll be happy when I'm done with my little soliloquy. There are many soft skills you can teach your team that can multiply their performance, their productivity, their yield, and their impact. Uh, and in combination, it's just like uh what we talked about in the previous show, like the 10-10-10. Yeah. It just gives you

Multiply Value Through Relationships

Jay Abraham 2:28

geometric growth if you understand it, but it has a lot of dimensions. So grow or die, multiply and diminish. You want to multiply the contribution you make to your market, your value proposition. You want to multiply your relationship with your vendors and your professionals. And that may sound illogical because most people just want to squeeze them down, but if you are the preferred client, customer, whatever you want to call it, of a vendor, they're going to favor you with intelligence. They're going to favor you with advanced access. They're going to help you when you need help. I always was taught you pay your vendors right away because when you need them and you can't, they'll be there for you.

Speaker 3:15

Yeah.

Jay Abraham 3:15

But if you basically string them out the moment that you need them, they're going to be that client.

Jim Fitzpatrick 3:21

They don't mind losing.

Jay Abraham 3:23

Being a uh multiplier or diminisher means that you really multiply the depth of relational capital you establish with your buyers. It means you don't want that to be transactional. We teach uh preeminence. We talked about it in a couple of other uh shows. Preeminence basically is about being seen in the eyes of your market as the only viable choice they can make, the most trusted advisory source for life. Even if you only have one thing you're selling, they your your client should feel good enough to refer all kinds of other people to you. Sure. Multiplying or diminishing means you multiply the your buyer's perception of your value so that they will want to refer where that's appropriate. Sure. Multiplying means you are expanding your understanding

R And D For Entrepreneurs

Jay Abraham 4:18

of possibility. There's a really interesting concept. Most people think of RD as it would apply to either technology or pharma.

Jim Fitzpatrick 4:27

Right.

Jay Abraham 4:28

But it really applies to entrepreneurs, large or small, because you want to test all the time new marketing, new markets, new new business models, new positioning, new uh online, offline selling approaches. And most people don't do any of that. That's right. And if you think about it, when technology or big pharma does RD, they lose more often than winning. But when they win, they get the billion dollar, the $10 billion, and the and the and the stock exploding uh breakthroughs. And you need to be committed to finding your own breakthroughs because there's a fallacy with breakthroughs. I'm maybe doing a little tangential, but it's really interesting. Most people think of a breakthrough as a tectonic, technology-driven type of a thing that's going to uh upend the whole business. But you can have safe, riskless breakthroughs in every facet of your revenue generation. You can have it in every facet of your management, you can have it every facet of your operation, you can have it every facet of your supply chain. And if you realize you could have dozens and dozens of safe, no-risk, no-cost breakthroughs that just make every one of those functions perform much better, it's the 10 times 10 times 10 times 10. And that's how you get exponential explosions. I don't know if that answer is clear or confusing.

Jim Fitzpatrick 5:50

Um how to multiply performance in your team and your market. Uh you you talk about clarity, uh curiosity, contribution.

Train Skills Beyond Product Knowledge

Jay Abraham 5:58

Yeah. So let me give you some concrete ways. The first is you want to train them in process training, not event training. So most small business owners don't even really train. If it's this is funny. When I interview sales-driven company heads, CEOs, entrepreneurs, and I say, Do you train your salespeople? They all say yes, but they're answering a totally different question. I'm asking, do you train them in consultative selling? Do you train them in listening? Do you train them in Socratic interviewing? Do you train them in being interesting? Do you train them in a myriad of self-skills?

Jim Fitzpatrick 6:42

Sure.

Jay Abraham 6:42

They're answering the question, do you train them in your product knowledge? Right. Totally different. Right. And when you understand the leverage in those skills I just rambled off, each one can add 10, 20, 30 percent more performance for your salespeople. So the first thing is you have to recognize that there's this whole plethora of skills that can be added to a team member, whether they're revenue generating, operational, anything that can be measured, denominated to increase either performance, profitability, or connection. You can make the person that answers the phone three times more impactful. You can make your customer service engage and set up a relational interaction that makes people want to buy more. You can make your delivery people more impactful. Well, I can go through a mirror because I've studied all this and I've helped hundreds of experts who used to focus only on those niches. Some of them have expanded, but when you understand all that's possible, the first thing you want to do is train your people continuously. But the mistake people make, first of all, they don't do it. Little ones don't, little small companies don't.

Jim Fitzpatrick 8:02

Right.

Jay Abraham 8:02

When you do, people think that a singular training is a wonderful achievement. In truth, we retain at most 9% of what we learn from a static training. You can go to a seminar, you can be trained, you can read a book, take a home study course, whatever you want to do, you retain 9%. And here's in and here's why. Because when you hear anything, your mind trips out and you're not hearing the rest, first of all. Secondly, it's usually theoretical. Third, over time, if you don't practice it, it just goes like this. That's right. But you need to

Process Training That Actually Sticks

Jay Abraham 8:41

master what's called process training. It is the way a doctor is trained, it is the way military trains, it's the way a pilot is trained. You learn, you progress, you do a little more, you do a little more, you do a little more, you repeat, you do a little more. And you keep doing it over and over again. So if I wanted to really nail training you, I would first of all introduce you to a training module. It could be a day, it can be an hour, it can be a weekend, it could be whatever it is, and then up three months later I do it again. Yeah. And then three months later I do it again. And here's why. You start here, zero.

Jim Fitzpatrick 9:15

Yeah.

Jay Abraham 9:16

You learn it, you get up to here.

Jim Fitzpatrick 9:17

Right.

Jay Abraham 9:18

Then you go and you coast down to about here. Right. Then you do it again and you go up here and you coast about here.

Jim Fitzpatrick 9:25

Okay.

Jay Abraham 9:25

Then you do it again and you go here. And it's a progression. So your first thing is you don't train once and think that is the be-all and end all. It's a process. And people don't always enjoy the second training because they they're bored. But if you force them in a benevolent way to keep doing it, the proficiency uh level they will expand to is unimaginable. It is geometric.

Jim Fitzpatrick 9:48

Yeah.

Jay Abraham 9:48

There are many soft skills you can train. As an example, friends of mine that I have helped, Stephen Covey, Stephen M. R. Covey, is the son of the late Stephen R. Covey. Stephen R. did the seven habits. His son is the world authority on business trust building. This is very fascinating. People think that, oh, our company is trustworthy. I'm a trustworthy leader. Our salespeople are trustworthy, our our uh dealings with vendors are trustworthy. But when you analyze what he has, there are 13 characteristics of rock solid, unimpeachable trust, and most people don't even manifest half of them. When you do, he has documented that it produces a 300% increase in all these denominators. Speed of uh commitment, you know, a sales cycle, uh size of the sale, stock price, uh

Soft Skills That Create Multipliers

Jay Abraham 10:46

repeat, collaboration internally, uh favorable treatment by vendors, and yet most people wouldn't even think to learn that.

Jim Fitzpatrick 10:55

Right.

Jay Abraham 10:55

There's a person named Roger Love who uh I will hopefully interview for you uh in one of these days, who's the world authority on strategic communication, how you are heard, tonality, yeah, inflection, cadence, pausing, that has measurable impact. That alone, separately, can be two, three hundred percent impact. There's another person, a woman who's got a funny name, Sally Hogshead, her real name. She is the world authority on how you are seen, authoritatively fascinating, and she's measured that the more authoritative and fascinating you are, as long as you don't have arrogance and hubris, that's another massive denominator. All these denominators are separate, they're not just one aggregate. So this is 100%, this is 50%, this is 20%. That's how you blow up a business safely, and that's also how you get everybody on board. Your people have to be on a unified mission and a crusade in behalf of the buyer, of the client, the customer, the patient. And you have to realize, Jim, that most companies are transactional. They work very hard to sell. I'm gonna sell you the coffee and this for your for your uh your group outside.

Jim Fitzpatrick 12:12

Right.

Jay Abraham 12:12

And then I'm done as long as you keep rebuying.

Jim Fitzpatrick 12:15

Right.

Jay Abraham 12:15

But a preeminent, a growth-oriented multiplier teaches the team and he or she themselves understand the transactional impact. I'm gonna know that I sold you the most delectable beans that are gonna have the best aroma, the least amount of acidity, and when you consume it, and when your team consumes it, not only will it electrify your your mental acuity, but it'll be delectable and you won't have a bitter taste. And I live in the transactional world that is the future, not the moment. When you do that and you get all your team to see not the sale, but the impact that your product, service, company, people are making in the lives of the businesses of the people buying your product or service, it transforms anyone. I can go on and on, but I hope that answers your question.

Jim Fitzpatrick 13:10

It does. And it's interesting that that business owners don't go down this road further because everything that you're saying, I'm sure that there's a lot of people shaking their heads saying Jay's exactly right on this.

Jay Abraham 13:20

Profoundly powerful.

Jim Fitzpatrick 13:21

Is it is it a is I I hate to use the word laziness, but is it is there a form of laziness among entrepreneurs that say, well, he what he's saying is right, but and it doesn't even take any more money, right? It just takes that effort to your point too. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Jay Abraham 13:35

I think it has to do with uh with catharsis, uh catharsis and and catalytic communication. So I have been very blessed. Don't ask me how or why, but I understand things, I can put them together, I can articulate them, I can demonstrate them, I can case study, reference them, and I can graphically illustrate them in a way where you can't argue.

Jim Fitzpatrick 14:01

Right.

Preeminence Over Transactional Selling

Jay Abraham 14:02

But most people don't, they don't they they don't know how to put it all together. And frankly, the majority of experts, I I tend to be a very unique animal. I guess you could call me if you wanted to, a polymath. Most people are tactical, they're just one thing.

Jim Fitzpatrick 14:17

Right.

Jay Abraham 14:18

And and they don't understand the holistic integration of everything. I understand strategy, business model, distribution channel, uh value creation, partnering, uh preemptive advantage, reclamation of some cost. So I can basically put it all together in a way that most people can't. And it's not that I'm that brilliant. I've been exposed to that many, not just scenarios, but in the course of my career, I've helped 350 of the world's top experts. And that's important, not because I've helped them, but in order to help them, I had to learn a distillation of their methodology. So what resides in my brain is uh and then if if you're blessed enough to be able to express, explain, and put it all together to where it catalyzes somebody and it's also cathartic because they go, Why didn't I see that before? Yeah. I mean, the truth of the matter, if you think about epiphanies, we have a wow, that's a revelation. Most epiphanies have always been there. We've just never seen it connected in the light that we need to to be receptive enough. And receptivity and acknowledgement, as impressive as that is, is an action. We were talking off uh camera, and I said, it's interesting. Most people who know don't do. People who do don't optimize. People who optimize don't maximize. People who maximize don't innovate, and people who innovate don't always exponentiate if that word exists. And there's this there's this uh connective sort of uh bridge of interactions that most people are never taught to aspire towards, because that's the la that's to me the logical progression.

Jim Fitzpatrick 16:06

Sure, sure. Is it a comfortability factor that that business owners and entrepreneurs may get to?

Jay Abraham 16:12

What I have seen more often than not, or most people spend most business owners, entrepreneurs, CEOs, uh you know uh professionals in private practices, startups, they model the industry. Well, Tony Robbins said this about me when he first understood w what I do and how I do it. He goes, if you're the best at what you do, you're only gonna still get incremental if you do it the same way as everybody else. That's right. But if you introduce methodology, thinking, strategy that nobody else in your industry understands, you're gonna get exponential growth and you're gonna get preemptive exponential growth. I'll give you one more reality which I think is ironic. I think there's a fallacy in the

The Trap Of Copying Best Practices

Jay Abraham 16:55

concept of best practices.

Jim Fitzpatrick 16:56

Okay.

Jay Abraham 16:57

If you, Jim, or any of your, I mean your entrepreneurs, but you also have uh uh uh a positioning in the automotive, if they are the early adopters to a best practice, they have a short window of advantage. But best practices are designed for everyone to adopt, right? So sooner or later everybody is doing the same thing, and it goes from a best practice to a standard operating procedure. That's right now. That's right. That doesn't mean the businesses, all the businesses, not just your business, are more efficient, more effective, but there's no advantage. My my belief in business is that it's the ultimate competitive sport. You don't want to compete on an equal playing field if you can have every ethical advantage that your competitor doesn't. And and and it's a maybe it's a formidable or it's not ruthless. It's just why compete just to so I mean I just watched uh I just watched the World Series and it was very exciting. Yeah, was but in a year or two uh Toronto won't even be remembered. And if you look at uh most sporting events, you don't remember the loser.

Jim Fitzpatrick 18:11

That's right. That's right. Nobody remembers the silver medalist at the Olympics, right?

Jay Abraham 18:16

See, I think most small medium businesses don't realize how joy it is to compete and emerge victorious. It's exhilarating.

Jim Fitzpatrick 18:26

Yeah.

Jay Abraham 18:26

Particularly if you're doing it adding value, particularly if you're doing it more strategically, particularly if you're doing it with an understanding of how to create geometric, not just current, but residual growth.

Wealth Gradients And Real Fulfillment

Jay Abraham 18:40

We talk about five gradients of wealth creation in business, and it applies small, medium. So you want to have you want to have more predictable current income, you want to have predictable future income, you want to have windfall income, where you basically go back and you say, why didn't I get this database I'm not using, I get these buyers that bought everything. I'm not I've got this this salespeople that are variable. If I can make you know half of them a little bit better, it's gonna blow up my business. You want to have psychic fulfillment because if you're not getting joy out of what you're doing, you got to get out of it. Because you can't be your best if you're not having fulfillment about what you do, who you do it for, what it does for them. Even if you're like a I hate the word like, if you are an ice cream vendor in the park, you have to have a great joy for the fact that if you're in an office area for 15 minutes a day, you're bringing you're bringing therapeutic um joy to somebody because they can go back to their childhood and they get them, they get a half a half hour or so away from the stress of the day. Right. And and you've got the best ice cream, the most delicious cones, and you smile, you make people better off. But it's a mindset that I don't think most people are exposed to because I would say this with uh with clinical um uh clinical certainty, not arrogance. I think I'm one of the only people that has ever put it all together.

Jim Fitzpatrick 20:13

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. And and it's really eye-opening, it is a breakthrough in when business owners hear it, entrepreneurs hear it, and they're sitting in businesses that could do so much more. And that's what you I think bring to the table in uh in in in in an incredible way.

Jay Abraham 20:30

There's a very interesting, and and I'll try to paraphrase it, it won't be as accurate. Maybe somebody who hears it and likes it can study it. Peter

Drucker’s Entrepreneur Versus Proprietor

Jay Abraham 20:38

Drucker, the renowned, he's long-deceased, uh uh business management guru, used to talk about the difference between a true entrepreneur and a proprietor.

Jim Fitzpatrick 20:49

Okay.

Jay Abraham 20:50

He said, uh, he used an example of a deli. I thought it was fascinating. He said, okay, so a proprietor will open a deli in an area where there's a lot of other food so that he or she is taking advantage of what I'll call the the the hunger jet stream.

Jim Fitzpatrick 21:06

Yeah.

Jay Abraham 21:06

And he said, they'll have a clean place, they'll have you know uh you know, polite, well-dressed people, uh, the counter will be nice, uh, they'll have cold cuts and bread in the counter, and people will be cordial and it'll be okay. Yeah. It's static. He said, a true entrepreneur understands it's all about not just the food, but the experience. Yeah. So the first thing is the front of it is gonna be so engaging and so fascinating, you're gonna be attracted. They're gonna pump out the aromas uh of their and ask me to tell you about my client in a minute in uh Florence, Italy, because I'll tell you a fun story about it. It's a pizza uh group. Uh they they they they have the counter set up to where they're not gonna buy the the and I won't name uh a subway company, but there's a lot of subway companies, and some of They just sell the most watery pressed because it's cheap, but it's tasteless. That's right. So they have the best, they invest in the best. They merchandise and demonstrate it and stack it so that it's mouth watering. They don't buy the tasteless buns. They invest in the kind that are so memorable and distinctive you can't wait to come back. They have names that are so memorable and fascinating for each sandwich or each salad. They're people who dress in a very unique way. They make the experience so pleasurable that you can't wait to come back. Right. And they make not just the sensory experience, but the the whatever you want to call it, the eating experience because the food is truly superior. Right. A proprietor doesn't even think that way.

Jim Fitzpatrick 22:59

No.

Jay Abraham 23:00

And I I would argue that the majority of small business owners, and I'm not trying to castigate or or accuse, but they don't even think about being a true entrepreneur. A true entrepreneur is a value creator. A true entrepreneur is an experienced creator. A true entrepreneur is a uh value creator, but not necessarily on cheapness, but on different denominations of value. Value is what am I getting out of the hour I'm expending? What am I getting out of the and we talk about me having to worry about gaining weight? What am I getting about that from that 800 calories I'm consuming? What am I getting about the for the $60 I'm spending? And I don't think they think at all about those things.

Jim Fitzpatrick 23:46

They don't. They think they think in terms of just getting the sandwich over the counter and doing a transaction and moving on to the next one.

Jay Abraham 23:52

And and to me, that is so laborious, mundane, unsatisfying, and and tactical.

Jim Fitzpatrick 24:00

Yeah.

Jay Abraham 24:00

And suboptimal.

Jim Fitzpatrick 24:01

That's right. And I think that business owners need to realize that even more in the products and services that they offer, right?

Jay Abraham 24:09

Well, if you if you think about it, and and let's go back to what I said, I think in this session, it's a competitive sport.

Jim Fitzpatrick 24:17

Yeah.

Jay Abraham 24:17

It's getting more competitive.

Jim Fitzpatrick 24:19

Oh, yeah.

Jay Abraham 24:20

And the stakes are higher and the costs are higher, and the yield for most generic commodity type tactical proprietors are getting lower and lower. And if you want to win and you want to have every ethical advantage, you have to think differently. See, this is another thing. If you think about what what a true entrepreneur is paid for, they're paid to think. But they're not really paid to just think generically, they're paid to outthink, out-strategize, out-market, out-value create, out, you know, outreach, out uh out uh perform and thus out earn their competition. And I don't think a lot of SMBs really think that way.

Jim Fitzpatrick 25:04

That's right. That's right. But they should. They they definitely should.

Jay Abraham 25:08

Because why would you dedicate the majority of your life, your hopes, your dreams, your income, your retirement, your fulfillment both financially and psychically, to something that could be multiplied unimaginably many more times over just by shifting how you do things.

Jim Fitzpatrick 25:27

That's right.

Jay Abraham 25:27

And

Final Challenge To Think Bigger

Jay Abraham 25:28

why?

Jim Fitzpatrick 25:28

That's right. The strategic edge with Jay Abraham. Thank you so much. Thanks for all the time you've given us here on the show. It's just amazing. As I said, I know that so many of our viewers get so much out of your visit with us. So thanks so much.