How to Identify and Eliminate Growth Constraints | Jay Abraham

On today’s episode of Power Lunch, business strategist Jay Abraham outlines nine “sticky points” that commonly limit business growth, profitability, and efficiency. He explains how hidden bottlenecks—often unnoticed by leaders—can create stalled revenue, inconsistent performance, and missed opportunities.

Abraham provides a practical framework for diagnosing where a business is stuck and taking targeted action to remove constraints. From optimizing lead generation and conversion to refining strategy, marketing, and cost structures, he emphasizes focusing on high-impact changes that unlock momentum. He also highlights the importance of positioning, delegation, and consistent customer engagement in driving sustainable growth. By addressing these friction points systematically, businesses can improve performance, expand market reach, and operate more efficiently—even in challenging economic conditions.

Key discussion points:

• Identifying and eliminating bottlenecks (“sticky points”) in business systems
• Improving lead generation, qualification, and conversion through consultative selling
• Managing inconsistent revenue with ongoing campaigns and customer engagement
• Strengthening strategy and aligning decisions with long-term objectives
• Controlling costs and increasing profitability through smarter structuring
• Leveraging time, talent, and partnerships to maximize efficiency and growth

Transcript

Welcome And Jay Abraham Setup

Announcer 0:00

This is the Power Lunch, exclusively on ASBN.com.

Jim 0:05

Hi everyone, Jim Fitzpatrick. Thanks so much for joining us this morning. In today's episode of the Power Lunch, we are joined by one of the world's foremost business growth experts, Mr. Jay Abraham. He's a business leader, top executive coach, and founder and CEO of the Abraham Group. Jay has spent his career helping business owners all over the world uncover untapped potential and multiply their results. Mr. Jay Abraham, thank you so much for joining me on the case.

Jay Abraham 0:31

My pleasure, Jim. Thank you. It's always great to have you in the studio. And uh I know that our viewers are going to get a lot out of today's power launch. So thanks again. Yeah.

Jim 0:41

Today I want to talk to you about uh what you call the the nine sticky points or the sticking point solutions. So let's delve right in there.

Jay Abraham 0:50

Okay, sure. Why don't I give you a little of a basis for our background? So most of my work is focused on revenue generation, revenue system optimization, uh positioning, strategy, uh business model, et cetera. And a few years ago I started looking at how businesses get stuck and whether they're getting stuck and even aware of it, whether they're aware of it and either don't know how to extricate themselves, and I also started looking at people who were successfully stuck and don't even know it because they're doing better than their industry, and they think that's pretty cool, which it is, but comparative to what it could be achieving from the time, effort, opportunity, capital, human capital, people,

The Nine Sticking Points Framework

Jay Abraham 1:40

they're accepting a fraction of what's possible. And I created this thesis, and it's it's pretty powerful in its elegant simplicity. So I identified nine areas. There might be nineteen, but I tried to look at the nine most common areas that entrepreneurs get stuck and how to get unstuck.

Jim 2:00

Yeah, yeah. Let's let's start with the first one.

Are You Stuck Without Knowing

Jim 2:02

Is your is is your business stuck?

Jay Abraham 2:03

Yeah. So you've got to be able to look at it from many vantage points. So you've got to say, okay, what drives most businesses? It's usually a continual influx of new prospects who convert to buyers. And buyers, if you have a multiple product service line who buy something, you know, and then keep buying more of it or more additions, or if it's a subscription like a SaaS, they keep doing it and they add people, you know, more uh whatever they call it, chairs or or positions. It's that people upgrade if you have upgrading. It's that you're penetrating new markets, it's that you're uh you're getting uh ever-increasing profits from understanding how to add. It's that you're not marginalizing and racing to the bottom. I mean, there's a whole litany of things like that, and very few entrepreneurs identify them. I should probably give you, and I can when I get back uh to my office, I'll give you a document that shows people just some of the areas that they could question. But most people don't even think about it. But each one of those is a it's a it's a litmus test of the direction your business is heading. And most businesses don't even know they're stuck, but they're almost always stuck in one or more ways, and they they don't realize those are friction factors that are keeping their revenue from growing, their profit from expanding, their their buyer uh base from from multiplying, their um their um their psyche from being low stressed because they have predictable future revenue and go on and on. But this is the first thing I say is uh are you stuck is probably a benevolent thing. Really, you could say you are stuck and don't know it. And again, there's two ways of being stuck. Stuck in the no-growth, static, and you're not there's no such thing as staying in the same place. We we talked in another issue about grow or die, multiply, and it's it's um it's uh pure pure um physics. You either expand or you contract, but you'll never stay the same. So if you're not really monitoring and gauging, not just whether you're stuck, but where you are stuck, and then you've got to figure out when you when you understand you might be stuck in six or eight different areas. You can't unstick yourself in each one right away. So the first thing is where's the highest and most important?

Find The Log Jam Lever

Jay Abraham 4:43

I use it uh a log jam analogy. You know what a log jam is, you pick out the right log, you remove it, everything flows. Yep. So you've got to find the right log jam that you can then basically remove because it frees up the next, and then you've got to be a pragmatic way to do it. But the first is really recognizing that in all probability you're stuck many ways and don't even know it. The moment you get unstuck in many, any, all of the areas, your business is going to it's going to expand dramatically. It could explode on the most important areas, which is which is predictability and profitability. Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.

Jim 5:21

So it the the the challenge there is identifying that one log that you say, okay, we've got to remove this in order for this to run smoother and also more profitable.

Jay Abraham 5:31

Yes, but you really want to understand all of them first because you can't we used to teach uh a whole course on optimization and optionality, and we would say you can't optimize until you first have an understanding, maybe not of all, but of a broad spectrum of the options, the possibilities, the alternatives uh that are available so that you can then choose the higher and better one than the one you're doing. So you have to first of all gauge where all am I stuck and how how mission critical is this uh stuck factor versus this. And it's very pragmatic. It's not as complex as it seems. Yeah. But the first thing is we go verily along and we accept we accept reality thinking we don't have control. We have a lot more control of a lot more drivers, factors, forces in our business than we recognize. That's sort of the premise of the whole thesis.

Jim 6:30

Yeah, yeah. No, I could see that for

Losing To Competition The Real Definition

Jim 6:32

sure. Um are you stuck losing out to the competition? That's every small business owner's and medium-sized business owner's biggest concern. Are we losing to the competition?

Jay Abraham 6:44

But let's start let's start with the the the psychology of it, and then let's talk about the mechanics of it, and let's talk about the verification, validation of it, and then we can talk about the mitigation of it, okay? So I would say almost every small business feels it it at least a an uncomforta a discomfort that they know they are losing to other people. If their business isn't achieving what they want, if it's dropped from last year, the margin, then they're losing out. But they don't question why they're losing out, how what they're doing is actually enhancing or exacerbating losing out, it's multiplying the lose out factor, and how to mitigate or or turn it around. So the first thing is if you're losing business to the competition, you have to decide, first of all, let's let's define the competition. There are many categories. I'm going to give make give you a positive headache. There are many factors in the competition. There are local small business competitors, there are national brick and mortar competitors, there are online competitors. There are alternative means. For example, if you and I were selling a uh supplement for weight loss, we could be losing out two other weight loss supplements, or we could be losing out two portion control food, or we could be losing out two gymnasiums or or health clubs or online, either private or group uh trainers. That's right. Uh and so we have to figure out who are we losing out to and how significant is their emerging dominance and why. Right. So that and it I don't think anything I say is is surprising, is it? No. But nobody ever thinks about that. So I want to know, okay. They just focus on that loss. So first thing is if you are losing out to whom and how, okay, let's tell

Competitor Research Most Businesses Skip

Jay Abraham 8:55

whom. So let's say it's a direct competitor, a little uh you're a small business, another one. What are they doing differently? Do they advertise? Do they have better better uh promotions? Are they have better signage? Do they do better online, offline radio? What are they doing that you are not doing and how is it doing? If you and I I'll give you an insight that is always I'm incredulous about this. We work with clients all over the world, we've talked about that, and they're representing about every kind of business and and uh type size scope imaginable. And one of the things I do when I start is I ask 200 question assessment, and I I have them answer. And a whole section is what do you know about your direct and indirect competitors? Yeah. And I am surprised because it is normally as close to zero. Really? And if you think about business as the ultimate um as the ultimate um competitive sport, and we're competing every day, not just for direct competitors, indirect competitors, but also for dollars and and for attention. If you don't even know, I mean, if you and I were gonna go to this okay, you go to the World Series, it just ended, okay? Do you think that every manager on both teams didn't know everything about everything about the pictures? Do you think every player didn't know where they're inclined to hit and what they're gonna do and how they're gonna flinch and tells?

Jim 10:26

But you bring up the World Series because you guys in LA won it, or was that No, I'm just saying it's But you're right.

Jay Abraham 10:34

If they play the game to win, why don't more small businesses? They don't.

Jim 10:39

They don't.

Jay Abraham 10:40

They almost play not to lose, but they they play to abdicate, and that's unnecessary. I'm not criticizing them on being clinical. So the first thing is figuring out who you're losing out to, why, how, and then we then you start to trying to devise the the compensating response. So if you're losing out to people that are online and you're not online, and that's where your audience is going, you have to decide to gingerly start going online. But just going online doing the same thing isn't going to be the answer. So, and this will take a longer conversation. You have to find advantages that your competitor doesn't. Many ways to do it. If they have a better location than you, then you're gonna have to find a better way to compensate. An easy way to compensate is to basically connect better to the other merchants in your area, if you're retail, and get them to refer to you, because that can compensate for a better area. Yeah. The next thing is are they, do they have uh do they have revenue generation? You don't. Maybe they have a sales force and you don't. Maybe they do special events and you don't. You've got to understand not just that you are losing out, but why and how.

Jim 11:57

That's right. And you can't you can't fix it till you know the problem. It's and and a lot of companies, as you know, will point to their to their pricing structure and say, well, let's just lower the prices. Yeah. Maybe that's what it is, right? When in reality, that could be the last thing on the list that's driving their consumer to their competition. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Jay Abraham 12:14

Yeah, you just hit on something very powerful. One of the other reasons is that you don't define value the same way as your audience. Right. I mean, it's funny. Uh I always laugh when people say, Well, well, w what do you stand for? And they go, well, service quality dependability. Well, they see it in very specific terms because they see how they create a product or how they deliver it, and they see the the support behind it. But when they say service quality dependability of the market, it means nothing. Right.

Jim 12:43

What does that mean?

Jay Abraham 12:44

When you interview 20 of your past clients, I always want to interview people that didn't buy from you, people that stopped buying from you, if it's if there's a if your product should be sustainable, not because they had an interruption or they no longer needed it. I want to talk to people who bought from your competitors. Yeah. I want to read all the reviews of everybody, direct and indirect, because it tells stories. It tells you what to do and what not to do.

Jim 13:14

Trevor Burrus, Jr. It sets out a blueprint for

Not Selling Enough Fix Conversion

Jim 13:16

you. Uh are you stuck not selling enough? Okay. I mean, that's that's that's what we all think right away.

Jay Abraham 13:22

Trevor Burrus, Jr. Well, so that's a different dimension. So the premise of not selling is all these have they're not one size fits all. And I I drive people crazy because I don't have a universal answer. I don't know if you ever saw a woman in a one-size-fits-all dress. One looks stunning. The rest is too short, too tight, too, too long, too. You know, too everything. And so I I do bespoke solutions. I and they're not the same for everybody. Right. So in terms of are you not selling enough, the first question, are you getting visitors, prospects, opt-ins, leads, uh, and they are not converting as opposed to not getting them. Right. And are they coming in qualified or not qualified? If you have interface with live interface, are you maximizing every facet of consultative selling? Are you selling the feature or are you selling the benefit? We talked about this in a conversation yesterday. In one of our books, we said when somebody goes to a hardware store to buy a drill, they don't really want a drill. They want to hold. And they don't want to hold. They want to fasten something, and that's not really what they want. They want to watch their 82-foot big-screen TV tonight on Netflix or WWF or whatever they're watching. And most people sell the feature, not the benefit. Are you doing that? Is your sales message really powerful? Does it conform congruently to what they want? Do you understand your your buyer and how the product service is going to work in their life, in their in their body, in their business? And there's all these questions that nobody thinks about. That's right. So that's first thing. Are you getting the leads and not converting? Are you not getting the leads? Are you getting leads that aren't really quality leads? Because you can change your message and double the quality or triple the quality. But you've got to also change your process. If it's online, are you basically creating a proposition that is really more compelling than the alternative? Are you basically demonstrating and proving its superiority? Are you introducing examples of other people who have will confirm that that is true? Are you making it easy for them to move forward instead

Sell Benefits And Reduce Risk

Jay Abraham 16:06

of not? That's called risk reversal and uh taking the friction out of it. Are you incentivizing them? I mean, if you're not doing any of those and you're losing out, just by doing those, you'll get more yield, if that makes sense. It makes total sense. Yeah. And then what are you doing afterwards? Because most businesses should be a residual base. You should be have people that come back over and over again and refer. Those are two dimensions. And if you're not getting them to come over and over again and you have product services they should be buying over and over again, you've got to say why. Right. Is that mean your product doesn't perform, your people don't engage, you don't really have enough continual interaction with them? If it's and you're not getting referrals, why? Well, it could be that you don't help them refer. Could be that they really aren't getting the value you think they are. I mean, there's what I'm trying to do not is not give somebody a headache, but awaken them to there are a lot of questions you need to ask, and when you get the answers, the data will tell you what to do next. It's very it's very wonderful, really, but I would say to you, 90% of the people don't even go this far.

Jim 17:21

Yeah. It's it's it's really unfortunate because if they changing, it changes their business.

Jay Abraham 17:26

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Well, I mean you'll get answers. So every one of the factors and we just talked about, if you think about it, it's a leverage point. And you and I have talked a lot about it. I come from a world of exponential thinking. You operate in what I call the exponential zone and you work on the geometry of your business because every time you improve one lever, even 10%, but you combine them together, it produces an exponential outcome which almost always multiplies your bottom line much bigger, faster, and safer than even your top. But you have to do the work.

Jim 18:06

That's right. That's right.

Erratic Volume Build A Pipeline

Jim 18:08

Perfect segue to the next, which is are you stuck with erratic business volume?

Jay Abraham 18:11

Yeah. When you have erratic business So here's something that people don't think about. It's true in life and it's definitely true in business. Two percent of what happens to everybody are acts of God you have no control of. Ninety-eight percent are the result of decisions you make or not, of of actions you take or not, of forces, factors, principles, uh laws of business that you either recognize and harness or you let whip saw you. So, I mean, yeah, three, four percent you can't control, the rest you can't. So if you've got erratic business, there's always a why. There's always a why. And are you running enough stimulating fact factors, ads, promotions, emails, offers, signage, uh brochures, uh, whatever you stick in a bag, however you're doing it, to stimulate a continuation of flow. Most businesses, unless yours is very unique, you don't sell initially. You start with somebody starting a relationship. It can be an inquiry, it can be a visitation to your website, it can be a webinar, it can be a show-up at your at your store or your salesperson calling on them. Every one of those can have flaws in the process that need to be fixed. But if you're not getting enough consistent revenue, you've got to go back to the origin and what's stimulated. If you don't run continual ads, you'll never get, or whatever, you'll never get a pipeline. Right. You need a pipeline. That is a universal concept. So again, perfect segue.

Strategy Versus Tactics And ROI

Jay Abraham 19:57

Are you stuck in failing to strategize? So if you look at the average business, I would say 50 million and under, their idea of tact of being strategic is being tactical. They don't even understand what strategy is. And strategy is very hard to understand, and we can get into it for hours, but it's really in a nutshell, it's having an end game that you're playing and having everything you do advance and enhance that end game, and not doing anything that doesn't, and questioning everything and constantly testing everything to improve the performance. But most people decide to do a little bit here, a little bit there. We were talking for another reason a couple of hours ago, and I talked about the fact that if you market or advertise, almost every entrepreneur that does, either over or under spends. And that even spending is a different concept than investing. Spending is speculating. It's saying, okay, I'm gonna throw this mud on the wall and hope and pray it works, as opposed to knowing with certainty the return you're gonna get for the investment you make. Because everything you do, every decision you make, every effort you make, every m meaningful action you take, every dollar you deploy in your business, whether it's equipment, people, office, signage, it is an investment or it's a speculation. And and the only way that you move a speculation to an investment is to know the risk and the yield you're getting and to question whether that's highest and best use of your limited resources. But yeah, you you want to be strategic. Strategy will always, always uh be tactics. And most people don't even understand that they're just doing a bunch of things. I was talking about uh uh over underspending. So people think all prospects, all buyers, all product types of buyers are worth the same, and they're not. Most people don't have any kind of an analysis of the different value of different types, sources, and and um and categories of buyers. But when you do, you might find that somebody that buys a coffee cup is a lot less valuable than somebody buys a coffee machine. And somebody buys a coffee machine might be a lot less valuable than somebody that buys five five-pound bags of Vietnam $100 a bag weasel coffee every month. But if you treat them all the same, then you're really under optimizing your opportunity. I don't know if that makes sense. Trevor Burrus, Jr. It does. It does make sense. But nobody even knows what things are worth. I mean, these are all not complex and confusing. They're very basic, pragmatic, and elegantly logical. Trevor Burrus, Jr. Yeah.

Jim 22:51

Yeah. And these are the kinds of things, too, that if business owners spent more time in these areas, they wouldn't have to spend so much time looking for that next customer. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Jay Abraham 23:02

And I'm going to replace it with invest more time. Yeah, invest more time. Because everything you do has got a yield. That's right. And if you don't know what you're getting on on the promiscuous investment you're making in a lot of things that are suboptimal, inefficient, underperforming, outright wasteful, then you're you're you're doing you're doing this you're you're you're sticking yourself. That's right. You're causing yourself to be stuck.

Jim 23:28

That's right.

Costs Squeezing Profits What To Do

Jim 23:29

Speaking of which, um are you stuck with costs that are eating up all your profits?

Jay Abraham 23:34

Yeah.

Jim 23:34

We see this all the time in business.

Jay Abraham 23:36

So there's many ways to abate that. The first way is to is to add other products or services and package to what you sell, so you multiply the profitability and you change the percentage. If I'm selling that coffee mug to you and it's five dollars and I used to make a dollar on that or three, and now I'm making half of that, the only way I'm gonna make more is either sell you a better deal on six of them or or a deal on that plus a survey, like a not a coffee maker, but a poor, like a nice little teapot. Sure. But I've got to there's a solution to everything, right? So that's one thing. The other thing is you can you can syndicate buying with other people so you get the price down, so you get a bunch of other people doing what you are if you're not uh international in scope. You can move many fixed cost to variable by shifting how you pay vendors, uh any kind of a revenue generator, and you correlate it to profit or transaction or saving or productivity, whether it's cash flow, whether it's sales, you can do I mean there's a multitude of things, but if you go, my margins are getting squeezed, and I'm not gonna do anything about it except basically I always use the and I like metaphors and examples because that's how your mind retains. Did you ever watch the Poseidon adventure? Of course. So they're sitting out in the middle of the ocean and all of a sudden there's this tidal weight coming at them, and there's nothing they do. You know, and if your tidal weight's coming at you and you go, well, I guess it's gonna hit me. I mean, that to me, reaction is the kiss of death in entrepreneurship. Sure. You have the ability to be proactive. Yeah. You have control, much more control than you think. There are certain things out of your control. You know, you can't really control here what's going to go on in Washington. You can't go control international geopolitics and all the repercussions. But you really have about ninety percent of c control of what happens to you in the terms of business performance. And if you accept reactivity, you know, the the statement I love is it's always yours to lose. And it and you're losing. If you're losing out, there's always a reason, there's a cause and effect. It's just like uh I hate the word like, but it's the equivalent of going to a doctor and and he's not gonna try to treat the symptom, he's gonna find the cause of the symptom. And basically, most small, medium entrepreneurs will lament the symptom, but they don't take any kind of corrective uh and remedial action to try to fix it. And and I'm always amazed at why somebody would invest a lifetime in a business, you know, eight, ten, twelve hours a day, capital, uh uh income, and fulfillment expectation. You know, that's their biggest part of their net worth. And accept reactive, you know, Poseidon-like thinking. It's just really interesting.

Jim 26:46

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: They'll even go out to the extent of borrowing money to survive, okay, through through this time, rather than changing, rather than looking at all of these different areas. They say, well, now we need capital, so now they're going to borrow against it rather than making some of the fundamental changes in their business or their product, so they don't need they don't need to borrow. Very profound point.

Jay Abraham 27:07

Also, most often, unless they dealt out of integrity in whatever they sold to past buyers, they have stored value. They could monetize probably much greater than all they could borrow, because if their business is not doing well, borrowing is going to be limited and they're going to pay through the nose for it. And they're going to probably not get it unless it's secured by either receivables or personal signature. But they've sitting on assets they can command and demand so much more immediate cash flow yield out of if they know how to do it.

unknown 27:42

Right.

Jim 27:43

That's right.

Stop Being Marginalized Become Preeminent

Jim 27:45

Are you stuck being marginalized by the marketplace?

Jay Abraham 27:48

Yeah. I mean, well, let's start with I I teach something, and you've heard it a couple of times, the strategy preeminent, being preeminent. Being seen in your market as the only viable choice somebody could make, no matter whether you're high end, low end, doesn't matter. Being seen as the most trusted advisor for life to the market you you serve. So they'll come back as often as justified, they'll refer as often as justified, they will hold you in very high, superior uh regard against everybody else. If you call somebody a customer, just to give you a little embarrassment, if you look up the definition, it's somebody who buys a commodity or a service. So if I call you a customer, what I'm really saying is I am no better than everybody else, I am a commodity, I am generic, and the fact that I get any business from anybody is uh is a godsend and I'm lucky as heck because I don't deserve it, because there's nothing about me that is unique, special, or superior. So the first thing I would start calling people clients, because a client is somebody under the care, the protection, the well-being, and it has a much deeper fiduciary type of an expect. But uh if if you are not so give me the category again, because I want to I had a thought that I wanted to embellish and I want to marginalizing. Yeah, no, no. So the first thing is you've got to have a reason why. Here's this the wonder drug concept in all of business is reason why. What is the reason why somebody should buy from you instead of your competitor? What is the reason why investing their money in you, their trust in you, their opportunity costs, because if it's a consumer, they only have a finite amount of money to spend. If it's a business, they have a lot more options than you. So why? If you don't have a reason why answer, you better find out. Because if you can't tell me why, why would I want to figure it out for myself? That's the first thing. Second, you want to basically figure out how to have advantage. An advantage has to be achieved by, first of all, comparing to what they already do. If you don't know why people buy from everybody else, how can you have an advantage? Right. I mean, I always ask people, do you study the high performers in your industry, not just your market? Right. No. Do you know how they command their advantage? Do you know what they do, what they say, how they position, what they what they uh offer people, whether it's tangible, intangible, service, added, bonus, extended, anything? Right. No. No. Well, I mean you got there's there's a reason why for everything, and that's what I'm saying. But nobody questions it. They go, okay, I'm the Poseidon. I guess this is the same thing. Right.

Jim 30:34

I guess this wave's gonna hit me.

Jay Abraham 30:36

Yeah. They are um, you know, there was a, and I don't believe this, there was a uh uh a psychologist called I I can't remember what the initials are, but his last name is Skinner. And Skinnerians believe that we don't have free will. I don't believe that. I believe we have control and free will. Sure. And the first thing is you have to acknowledge and recognize the drivers of the of the whatever dynamic is occurring in your business, there are drivers. Now, if there's a total trend in your industry to not even use yours because there's a more uh a more uh technological or innovative alternative, then you have to decide is your business one you need to stay in. Right. I mean, that is a conscious decision. And

Pivoting When Markets Change

Jay Abraham 31:22

if the answer is not is the business, then you've got to decide the industry, because the industry is bigger than the product service that you're offering. So for example, if I was just offering coffee cups but people now are buying paper cups, or vice versa, I'd have to decide. Do I want to stay in that area of coffee, or do I want to basically, instead of being sucking wind, do I want to be leading the charge? Yeah. But most people don't even think that way either. They've they've conditioned themselves that this is all I am, all I can be. And it's very scary to reinvent yourself. It's very scary to reset yourself. It's very scary to position, and yet if you study almost all of the major corporations today, most of them all had to reset and pivot because either what they were doing stopped working. Right. I mean, look at Amazon. If all they were doing is books today, they would be probably successful, but they wouldn't but they leveraged into so many other areas.

Jim 32:28

Trevor Burrus, Jr. And then when you think of all the companies that are no longer that no longer exist that didn't pivot. That's exactly right. This is all we're going to do. Kmart or Sears or any of the others said, or Kodak that said, nope, we don't need a digital camera, we sell film, and they didn't pivot. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Jay Abraham 32:43

So it scares people, but if you if part of part of getting unstuck is getting excited instead of intimidated by change.

Jim 32:53

Yeah.

Jay Abraham 32:54

So change is inevitable. You're not going to stop change. All you're going to do is either have it work for you or against you. And if you re if you reprogram your psyche to be stimulated by change and experimentation and and evolution or revolution, you're going to have an exciting future. If you don't, you're doomed.

Jim 33:19

Gotta gotta be moving. I agree. Constantly be

Marketing Breakthrough Target And Message

Jim 33:22

moving. Uh are you stuck with mediocre uh marketing? The answer is yes. Almost always yes. Drill down on that.

Jay Abraham 33:29

Well, I mean, so there there's so many facets of a marketing breakthrough that you could achieve. And I'll start with the market you you target. So years ago, I started realizing that everyone else runs ads or they pay for advertising to reach a small portion of a broader market. Whereas you can find the companies, the organizations, the associations, the influencers who have that audience. And if you align with them either on a paid or a pay-for-results basis, you're going to concentrate 100% of your attention on the real market, not trying to pay for a small segment. So the first is, are you even reaching the market in the most efficient, effective, productive, and concentrated way possible? Usually no. Second, even if you are, is your message anywhere close to optimal? And the message has to be many things. It has to start by addressing the felt need they are after, that that outcome they want, not just the purchase. Number two, it's got to prove that yours is really better for whatever criteria they want longevity, performance, economy, prestige. Next, you've got to get them to want to take an action. One of the most everyone thinks that we're we're vying for purchases. First thing you're vying for is attention and trust. And if you don't understand that if you're not getting it, there's a reason. There is a reason you are being dissed by the market. There's a reason for everything. And you have to have the reasons to give them for not dissing you, for not, you know, distrusting you, for not believing you have a better alternative, anyhow. That's just lots of them.

Jim 35:31

Yeah. And it all of these things that you're talking about, it just takes the time and the focus of the business owner to go through these items. Right. So that's all it is. It doesn't cost you any more money. It's not like you've got to bring in some top consultant. It's just to focus and zero in on each one of these areas and take a closer look at your business.

Jay Abraham 36:02

And it challenged people to look more nuclear, more granularly, more um more um more in terms of of drivers of of drivers of everything, not even of positive results, but of negative, because as I said, three percent approximately acts of God.

Jim 36:23

Yeah.

Jay Abraham 36:23

Everything else, there's a cause behind it. And if you don't recognize, first of all, that you are the recipient of the symptom, which most people don't, they just look, they aggregate it. Business is down. Right. We're not doing well. Right. Traffic is down. Right. Our margins are cut.

Jim 36:38

Right. And if it's down for me, then it's it's probably down for my competitor too, and they're probably not making any changes either. It's just off. Businesses, the market's not there right now. Yeah. Rates are too high. Consumers are not outspending, whatever the excuse is that we're coming up with. Um

Stop Saying I Can Do It

Jim 36:54

are you stuck saying I can do it myself? Yeah. As an entrepreneur, I've fallen into that many times.

Jay Abraham 37:00

There's a really interesting um experiment that uh Brian Tracy used to do, and we had him uh do a whole day at one of my $30,000 seminars once, and he started by asking a question to the entrepreneurs. He said, What is your time worth right now, and what do you want it to be worth? And they would all go, Well, what do you mean? You go, I mean just what I said. Let's take what you made last year, let's divide it by the hours you worked, and let's see what you're worth per hour. Right. So let's say you made $200,000 and you worked uh 50 weeks and you worked 40, let's say you work 50, because it's easier to calculate. So 50 times 50, what is that? Is that 2,500 hours? Yeah. And you made 200 grand. So what did you make per hour? You made like $40? Yeah. Whatever it is. What do you want it to be work? You want to make a million dollars? Okay, well, you don't have more than 24-7, right? You don't have uh a super colossal IQ beyond everybody. So if you don't do anything different, how are you going to go from 40 to 400? Right. You've got to get leverage. That's right. You've got to do highest and best use and leverage.

Jim 38:13

That's probably the first time those individuals ever did that exercise. They never figure out what how much is it I'm making per hour in my business and where do I want to go on an hourly basis, right? Yeah.

Jay Abraham 38:23

We would see when I used to do seminars, uh an entrepreneur who is such a control freak, and this is before the the uh internet and digital and everything, he or she would come in early so that they could basically set up everything and make sure it was right, and they would check the time cards and and all this dissipation of opportun it's all opportunity cost. It's all an investment. If you invest in low-yielding things instead of high, you can't get. So in other words, if I invest in CDs instead of growth stocks, I'm not going to get a great return. That's right. It's safety, but you have to decide the game you want to play. But most of them think they are the only ones that can do it. If you take all the functions that are required in your current job, and then you value the significance of them vis-a-vis, who else could do 80 or 90 percent as well, you will find that probably a third to 40 percent of your time is being poorly invested in low-yielding activities that are consuming the most precious thing you have time, opportunity cost, attention, and resources. So if you are doing a lot of functions that could be achieved by a $25 an hour person or outsourced, you need to do that. We have a colleague who is a world authority on operational efficiency. He basically shows people how to get an extra five hours a week for themselves and their team by organizing their communication. I don't have my phone here. If you're obsessed with looking at your phone in the stock market and Facebook and all your emails every minute, you're not optimizing this precious, precious, invaluable commodity talk called time and opportunity cost. If you are doing it's also it's you know it there's uh this is me talking. I want to play to my superpower. I don't want to play to my weakness. People go, well, my goal is to is to improve on everything I'm weak at. And I'll say, well, well, if you improve at everything you're weak at, the odds are you'll never get more than mediocre. So weakness to mediocrity is a limited yield. Operating in the exponential and the genius and the superpower zone is the yield. I mean, it's all about it's all about return on investment, isn't it? And most people don't question. Also, control freaks, you will only achieve greatness when you leverage off of other people who are either better than you in what they do, more skilled than you in what you do, or can take over for you things you shouldn't do. Right. And most people love to be control freaks. That's right. That's the dumbest thing in the world. My wife gets mad at me because I don't do any heavy lifting. I don't change light bulbs, I don't know heavy lifting, you go to light bulbs. Yeah. Well, I mean, I don't do any of that. And she goes, well, you should do it. I go, well, if I use my time for a client and I'm gonna get paid fifteen thousand dollars an hour, or I'm gonna get a piece of the upside, and it might be more like fifty thousand dollars an hour. Why would I want to do something that I can pay somebody fifty dollars an hour to do? Right. Where I can concentrate on something that's gonna be a hundred, a thousand times. But nobody the the key to this conversation we're having is really you need to question everything that is going on, and that you have to be better connected to yourself and your business. Yep, that's right. That's

Growing In A Crisis Economy

Jay Abraham 42:09

right.

Jim 42:09

Last but not least, how to get going, and which is perfect for right now, but how to get going and growing in a crisis economy. There's a lot of uncertainty out there today, as you know.

Jay Abraham 42:20

But the one thing that I have seen over many decades, because you know I've been doing this for a long time a market can drop, but it very rarely drops 100 percent. There's still gonna be buyers. That's right. And there's two sides of it. One are all the new buyers, and the other are all the buyers that are dealing with your competitors. Right. When an economy drops, the typical knee-jerk response of your competitors are to cut services. Yeah. They're gonna cut the relational uh interaction, they're gonna cut, they're gonna just do things that make the reason that their clients have been doing business with them less less compelling. So you're gonna have two markets, the new markets coming in, and you're gonna have the existing market that is not getting the same outcome they were. If you understand the reasons why those people can be benefited better from you, you can grow in a downward market. It's very, I mean, it's not theoretical. It's I mean, I can show you on paper that these things are gonna happen. You have to be proactively able to capitalize it, but there's no way you can if you don't even understand the dynamic that's occurring. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Jim 43:32

That's right. That's right. And there's so many small, there's 33 million small business owners out there uh today. Um Having said that, with all the uncertainty that we see out there, for those that are on the sidelines that are thinking about starting a business, is now a good time to start a business?

Jay Abraham 43:48

It's always

Starting A Business With Partnerships

Jay Abraham 43:49

a good time, but not the way most people do it. If you're gonna start a business from scratch right now, what I tell everybody, even my children, is if you're gonna do it the way everybody else does it, unless you You've got you're a trust fund baby and you're gonna start you know with millions of dollars and you have plenty of time, or you're gonna go to a VC and and get a ton of money. The way to mitigate um mitigate danger is to partner with other companies, people, organizations, associations that have a very strong direct access to the market you wish to serve and make them your either your partner, your endorser, become the recommended provider, co-brand. There's a piece of st of statistics that is pretty profound. Two thousand of the largest corporations in our country right now get twenty percent of their revenue, but forty percent of their profit from partners, co-branding, endorsers. So I think I mean every time I I start with a client, the first thing I do is say, okay, who's already got access, not competitive, but direct access to the same market that we can partner with and pay them on results. So we don't risk marketing we don't know anything about. We don't risk capital which is limited. But yeah, it's always every all the time is always the right time if you have the right strategy and the right business model, the right reason why. All the time is the wrong time if you don't.

Jim 45:25

That's right.

Jay Abraham 45:26

That's right.

Final Takeaway And Farewell

Jim 45:27

I'm gonna leave it right there. Thank you so much. Thank you, J Abraham.

Jay Abraham 45:30

I appreciate it.

Jim 45:32

You definitely did. I know that our viewers get a lot out of whenever you're on with us here at ASBN. So thank you so much.

unknown 45:37

Thanks.

Jim 45:39

Thanks for watching the power limb exclusively.