How to Multiply Revenue with What You Already Have | Jay Abraham

On this episode of Strategic Edge, business strategist Jay Abraham explains how small business owners can unlock exponential growth by maximizing the potential of their existing resources. He challenges the traditional focus on revenue and expenses, introducing “yield” as a critical factor that drives long-term, compounding results.

Abraham outlines how many businesses become “successfully stuck,” achieving stability but failing to recognize the larger opportunities within their current assets. He shares a practical framework for scaling through three core growth levers—clients, transaction value, and purchase frequency—before expanding into advanced strategies like entering new markets, adding products, and strategic acquisitions. By adopting a safety-first mindset and focusing on low-risk, high-return opportunities, entrepreneurs can significantly increase profitability and long-term business value without additional complexity.

Key discussion points:

• Why most businesses underutilize existing resources and miss growth potential
• The role of “yield” in driving compounding, long-term results
• The three core levers: clients, transaction value, and purchase frequency
• How to move from incremental gains to exponential growth thinking
• Advanced strategies: new markets, new products, and acquisitions
• Adopting a safety-first mindset to scale with minimal risk

Transcript

Welcome And The Growth Question

Jim Fitzpatrick 0:32

Mr. Jay Abraham, thank you so much for taking the time out of what you're uh seems to be a very busy schedule these days. We're a world traveler helping businesses all over the globe. So thanks so much for joining us. Yeah, here on the strategic edge with Jay Abraham. We're so blessed to have you here. So um we want to talk to you today about designing scalable uh business models for exponential growth. So I want to start off by asking you what does exponential really mean for small businesses and why do most people settle for incremental growth?

Why Most Owners Think Incremental

Jay Abraham 1:05

Well, I think that the first answer is they don't know any better. Yeah. They don't know that the same amount of time, same amount of effort, same amount of access to the market, same amount of resources, investment, people could be producing multiple times more result up front and an even greater result down the line. No one's ever taught them that. And it seems intimidating. And if you've never grown a business more than a few percent, and a lot of smaller businesses, Jim, are organic. They really don't have discipline, strategic methodology driving their growth. They don't understand long-term, uh, we call it 3D thinking as opposed to 2D thinking, and I hope this isn't too confusing. But most small business owners are medium too. They see revenue minus expense equals profit. It's a static concept.

Jim Fitzpatrick 1:59

That's right. That's right.

Jay Abraham 2:00

An exponential entrepreneur, which is a phrase we we coin, and they operate always in the exponential, not the incremental zone, see yield. All the different ongoing, perpetual uh financial benefits that come from an asset, a prospect, a distribution channel, a buyer, a salesperson, a product category. And I think that most small business owners have never never been uh clearly and simply introduced to the power of geometry driving their business. And it's much, it's much simpler than it sounds, and it's much more predictable. And I always I always defaulted to safety first, low or no investment second, and what I call the 10x bottom line moonshot, meaning why focus on growing the top line 10x if it's easier, safer to start by growing the bottom line 10x, and then using that money for the bigger, like the the shifts that are tectonic and very dangerous. Sure, sure.

Jim Fitzpatrick 3:08

Do you think that most small business owners just don't think of it that far? They're just so focused on building their widget, getting it out the door, making a profit from that, and being

Jay’s Origin Story And Pattern Spotting

Jim Fitzpatrick 3:18

satisfied with that.

Jay Abraham 3:19

Yes, and I'll give you a couple of reasons why that I think will resonate. Well, first of all, half of the small business people got into the business for one of two reasons. It was either reaction to a life trauma or it was an attempt to avoid being controlled by somebody else. Good point. They didn't get into it really to take the business to its full potential. Sure. Now, if you think about the bookstores when they existed, if you walked into a bookstore, there will be a huge wall, and on one side it'll be psychology, relationship, parenting, sexuality. The other side might be skill sets, hobbies, uh uh and all kinds of uh nonfiction topics. Then you'd go to the back and there'd be this tiny little area for business. Right. Marketing, advertising, sales, management, because they weren't, and that's because only about 5% were really committed enough to learn. But if you think about it, most of all the experts out there, and there's 350 categories that of expertise that have exponential growth potential, they all have the ability to multiply performance, to double, redouble, redouble again what somebody can get from a business. But I don't think the majority of them even believe that it's achievable.

Jim Fitzpatrick 4:40

Yeah.

Jay Abraham 4:40

Because they've never done it.

Jim Fitzpatrick 4:41

That's right. That's right. And what you're known for worldwide is the ability to go into a company, look at it, and say, without any further marketing money or more headcount, you can grow this business as it is with just this new way of thinking and education. Right? Yeah. Talk to me about that.

Jay Abraham 5:02

Well, so I I need to give you, and and I think we might have talked about it in other uh interviews you've done with me, but I need to give you my origin story. So I got started very young, and I didn't have an education, and the only people that would give me a job were entrepreneurs who would let you eat what you kill, meaning didn't get a salary, you got a piece of whatever you generate. Sure, I've been in that situation. Yeah. And uh at first it was scary, but then it was really interesting. And they don't care if you work one minute or 12 hours. At the end of the day, is you know, did you generate revenue, kid? You get your piece. If you didn't, sorry. And I always did five or six things, and as luck would have them, they were always in different industries. After about 10 of them, I realized that people in one industry don't have a clue how other industries think, act, market, strategize, business model, uh, create value, source. And you could take the most common as dirt methodologies from industry A, add it to common as dirt from B, combine it and put it in C where no one's ever seen it, and it blows up because most people follow the herd. They do the same thing, plus or minus, 10, 15%, better or worse than everybody else in the industry. Not because it's the highest, best, fastest, safest, most significant growth mechanism. It's just that that's what everybody else does. So it must be implicitly the best. And it really very rarely is. I've been blessed to see how much more you can get by just shifting your approach or shifting your strategy or shifting your business model without paying one more penny in exposure, risk, or investment.

Jim Fitzpatrick 6:46

Right, right,

The Three Core Growth Levers

Jim Fitzpatrick 6:47

right. If we go through these three growth levers that uh you've talked about before, increase the number of clients, increase the average transaction value that we've talked about before, increase frequency of repurchase. Talk to us about that.

Jay Abraham 7:00

Well, I mean, if you ask somebody how many ways do you think there are to grow a business, they'll go, uh, there must be hundreds or thousands. And there very truly are hundreds or thousands of tactics. But if you talk about real drivers of business growth and more specifically drivers of exponential business growth growth, pardon me, there's three main and three advanced. And and these are they. And if you work on just these three or these three in the advanced ones, it is impossible not to grow your business consistently by orders of magnitude, top line, but grow the bottom line much, much, much bigger.

Jim Fitzpatrick 7:44

Right, right. And and the first one that I've got here is increase the number of clients. Right. I mean, that's that's what everybody thinks right off the bat. I just I need more clients. So how do I go about doing that, right?

Jay Abraham 7:54

Yeah. So just to comment, most people they're not strategic, they're not systematic, they're not consistent, and they only have one approach that they use, and they don't question even that approach being taken to optimal or maximum. Right. And it's very easy to change elements in whatever you're doing and make it do more. I mean, I think I may have told you offline that we've tested uh different ways of greeting somebody at the front door of a large furniture chain and one approach triple conversion. We've tested uh repositioning the benefit as opposed to the features of a a product and tripled result. We've tested adding a bonus and doubling result. We've tested, and these are all separate, not not at aggregate. We've tested changing how you reverse the risk, how you make it easier to say yes than no and doubled results. We've tested bonuses and doubled results. Well, when you have that kind of power just in simplicity to apply to what you're already doing, that alone is powerful. But truthfully, if I had my way, I would challenge everyone to stop doing what they're doing because it's very rarely the best, the highest, and the most powerful. It's usually the least and the most difficult. Now, people have to realize that acquiring the first buyer is the most expensive, the most time-consuming, uh, and the most challenging. Once you get them, then you go to the second level. But we have approximately 150 different tactics for doing it. And to go into them would take a whole two days. But but most people don't even have one tactic. I mean, people who have built their business on word of mouth or referral, as an example, that's a great accolade because it means people see value, but most of them don't even have one comprehensive strategic systematic referral generating process that they

Simple Tests That Triple Conversions

Jay Abraham 9:58

adhere to. And yet, if you do, you would double or triple referrals. We know 125 ways to generate no cost, high value, high converting referrals. And and what a the point I can go on and on and on because that you can you can get strategic alliances, you can add new revenue streams, you can add new ways of reaching your market, you can, you know, you can uh you know double, triple your online. I mean, there's just a multitude of things that most small medium businesses they they sort of implicitly know. It's it's almost a how would I call it? It's like a haunting awareness that deep down in the craw of their being, they know to be true. But if they're making enough money and they have been inculcated in a belief that if you can grow incrementally 10, 15 percent, that's great. And a lot of them are what I call successfully stuck. They're outperforming their industry, or more specifically, their wildest dreams of income. You know, somebody that can't be plateau. Yeah, well, they're content, they're they're complacent, and they're actually almost they're almost cockily confident because they don't realize that what they've done is a minuscule of what that opportunity is made possible. Now, I'll integrate one more thing, and I'm giving you probably a little bit of a headache. So we teach to always be preeminent in what you do. And there's a lot of dimensions to preeminence. But if you're going to be preeminent, then you have a moral obligation if your company, your product, your service, your people produce a far greater outcome for the recipient than your competitors. You need to grow the number of buyers, you need to grow the number of clients, you need to grow the number of patients, because if you don't, you're allowing them to be serviced by people who don't contribute as much as you. So there's almost a moral obligation and responsibility if you want to take it to sublime.

Jim Fitzpatrick 12:08

That's right. That's right. When you're in last, we talked about the fact that uh Starbucks uh came out and and had their people ask everyone at the cash register in the airports, would you like a bottle water with that, right? And it made an incredible difference just in that in that one movement.

Jay Abraham 12:25

Well, McDonald's is you know, you want fries, you want to supersise? Sure. They don't do it because it doesn't work. That can double, that can double or redouble the profit per transaction. That's right. There are surprisingly uh elegantly simple and almost uh almost uh too simple concepts you can add to whatever you do now that could multiply not your revenue, but the profit that revenue brings you. Because a lot of people don't understand this. You've got

Bigger Transactions And Repeat Buying

Jay Abraham 12:58

a business, you've got an overhead, that overhead is serviced by the transactions you're doing now. But everything you add above and beyond that is really many times more profitable. There's a fascinating uh study out. 2,000 of the top corporations in the United States get 20% of their revenue, but 40% of their profit from partnerships because it's all additive, it's all incremental. When you understand, I'll call it incrementalism, I don't know if it's the right word, that by adding to the transact, well, we're getting it in the second category here, which is increasing the size ethically of the transaction and thus the profit. You can increase the size nominally, but the profit triple by adding another item, a larger unit, uh a An additional service? Yeah, an additional service, a warranty that costs very little and has little redemption. Sure. But but you're but obviously you're not doing it covert. If they if they have a redemption, you you serve, you treat it.

Jim Fitzpatrick 14:00

But addition doesn't cost you anything in acquiring another customer. Because we know that can be a very expensive proposition. Yep.

Jay Abraham 14:07

And and if we have time, it may or may not uh a thread through the needle we're talking about. But I'll talk to you about how all of this multiplies the multiple that your business will ultimately sell for. And then I will challenge that most small and medium businesses don't even think about that. They don't look at their business as the ultimate wealth-building asset that at a point is worth many times more when it's sold than they ever can get out of it working there. It's a whole different mindset.

Jim Fitzpatrick 14:35

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Um, increasing the frequency of repurchase. Yeah. Right? Yeah.

Jay Abraham 14:44

Well, it's two things. It's bringing them back to buy more of what you've got, or if you don't have anything else to sell, not deciding, okay, our relationship is over, but finding other, finding more what I call utility value. I've got uh a hard won trust that I've created with you. Right. Cost me a lot, time, effort, advertising, whatever it is, to get you to buy the first time. If I have a lot of things that you can buy and you're not buying them all, I need to help you see the value. If I have one thing you could buy frequently, but you don't buy it frequently enough, I have to help you see the value to you, not to me.

Jim Fitzpatrick 15:23

Right.

Jay Abraham 15:24

If you're buying everything I have to sell and you have nothing else to sell, you've got to find more utility value. Let me give you a case study because that'll be much easier.

Tony Robbins And Utility Value Extension

Jay Abraham 15:32

It was profound. So in the beginning of my relationship with Tony Robbins, who you know I have a collaboration with, all he was doing was literally uh personal development, motivation, and a teeny tiny bit of sales training. Okay. So those were his three concepts. And I believe that within his database, he had a lot of entrepreneurs who were prosperous, who made a lot of money, thought the money was going to basically transform them, the heavens would open, the angels would trumpet, nirvana would befall them, they'd never have another problem, and it wasn't that way. And they were looking for meaning and they were attracted to Tony. He didn't really understand that. So I said, well, let me prove it, because I was doing very expensive uh seminars. Back, I was doing $5,000 ones to $30,000 when people were charging $500. Right. They were audacious, but they were very valuable. He didn't think there was much there, so I got him to let me mail $20,000 of the people that bought everything. He had nothing else to sell.

Jim Fitzpatrick 16:33

Yeah.

Jay Abraham 16:33

And we spent this is in the days of letters, not the internet. Uh cost me $10,000 to mail 20,000 letters, and we brought in $9 million. He saw that, and all of a sudden, now here's a business. I'll keep my hands down. Here's a business that was three little parts, none of which were very high, high priced. Right. All of a sudden he sees that I can get $15,000 from the same audience he didn't see that extension. Right. So then he gets into the business market and he creates a $10,000 program and a $15,000 advanced program. Then he realizes he could also do an $85,000 mastermind and even a $150,000 one. Then he realizes that he can help these people with financial literacy. So he starts, first of all, educating them. Then he's got training programs he makes profit on. Then he gets an interest in a management firm and he went from prosperous to wealthy. When I knew him, he had a $10,000 home and a little helicopter. Now he's got a $40,000. One of his many houses is 40,000 square feet on the beach in Palm, Palm Beach, and he's got a 767. But that's what extension is.

Jim Fitzpatrick 17:49

Gets back to the exponential growth.

Jay Abraham 17:51

Yeah, and there are ways to do it. I mean, so that's what you want to do, but then the driver of it is the strategic way you interact, you you communicate, you develop and demonstrate the value, the meaning of moving forward or continuing to purchase or buying other things. And you've got to say, what uh what else do people buy before, during, after, instead? But those are the three basic ways. You increase the number of buyers, you increase the size ethically of the transaction and thus the profit, you increase the frequency or the utility value. And those are the three. There are three advanced, which I'll happily explain if you'd like to hear them. Sure, absolutely.

New Niches New Products Smart Acquisitions

Jay Abraham 18:38

Okay, they are first of all, you penetrate a new market or niche every year. That's because you can probably look within your database and see that you actually have attracted segments. Maybe they're runners, maybe they're people who drive Mercedes, maybe they are doesn't matter. When you see that they are attracted to you for a reason you hadn't even thought about, you can go to that market, or there are markets that you can penetrate that you've not really zeroed in on from a more targeted approach. Number two is you basically you add one new product minimally a year. Why? Three reasons. If it's a modest product and you sell an expensive product or service, it it becomes your front end. It's a lot easier to start a relationship if you're spending $100 rather than $10,000 or $100,000. If it's a reasonably uh middle price product, you add it to the purchase and you double or triple the profit. If it's an expensive product, you put it at the end and it could double or triple the lifetime value you generate. You've already got the sunk cost in the relationship. Right. You've already expended that. Everything else is just gravy. Right, right.

Jim Fitzpatrick 19:52

I hope that explains it. It really does. There's no question about it. Um the when we talked about why people focus on certain things here, why do most entrepreneurs only focus on one of the levers?

Jay Abraham 20:05

Well, nobody has ever, first of all, explained this in a simple and yet powerful graphic sense. Yeah. And we have graphic demonstrations that blow people's mind. I should tell you this. I have uh I have a graphic, and it shows that if you have a company, we have a hypothetical company. This hypothetical company has a thousand existing buyers. Right now they are spending $100 every time they purchase and they're buying two times a year. Okay. Simple, simple metrics. Right. Most small medium entrepreneurs couldn't even tell you those three dramatic. They couldn't, they couldn't tell you any act, they can't tell you what the average sale is, they can't break it by products, service categories, and they definitely don't know uh what the dynamics are. But if you take those three simple dynamics, a thousand buyers, $100 at purchase, two purchases a year, it's a $200,000 business. Just an ex example. Sure. If you increase those three categories merely 10%, 1,000 becomes $1,100, $100 becomes $110, and 2 becomes 2.2. It's a tiny little addition every year. One one little minuscule more purchases. The extension is not 10%, it's 33%. And if it's a marginal business at that thousand, hundred and two, when you get to that 33% increase, it could double or redouble the profit. That's powerful, but let me give you one more powerful point. If you double those numbers and 1,000 became $2,000, and the $100 average sale became $200, and the two time

Business Geometry Mindset And Closing

Jay Abraham 21:40

became four, it's not double, it's 800% increase. I have been tutored, weaned, trained, mentored on working on the geometry of a business. Now, back to the advanced three ways, because I got tangential. First is you penetrate a new market or niche. Second, is you add a new product. Or service. The last one is you acquire a business or a segment of a business every year, but you do it very inventively. And I can explain it in a minute, but you buy a business that is complementary, but basically has buyers you don't have, or has products you don't have, or has salespeople you don't have, or has distribution you don't have, or you buy a discussion group, or you buy a podcast because you have preemptive access to the market, or you buy a URL, or you buy a phone number if somebody goes out of business. And it's a very strategic way to grow. And it seems so simple. It is, but it's too simple. A lot of people are looking for the silver bullet that's going to rock their world. Right. And when I explained to them that it's elegantly simple. You're basically setting on it. It's elegantly simple. It's, you know, Tony Robbins has this, and this is funny, but it's it's a metaphoric example. Tony Robbins makes you walk on fire to break through yours. Right. And I always wanted to have you walk through jello to demonstrate it's not that hard, metaphorically, because it's not. But there is there is a breakdown because I can show you undeniably the power of it. I can show you, because we have as many as a hundred tactics in each of these, and I've done it around the world to the tune of literally about $75 billion of profit, not revenue growth. And I can show you how it translates in any language, size, type, scope, business, any kind of regulatory. There's ways to apply it everywhere. And yet, when you do that, I was telling the story. People don't. They go, that's so cool. That's so makes such good sense. And they go right back into that black hole of status quo thinking. And that's always perplexed me.

Jim Fitzpatrick 23:46

That's right. That's right. It's just incredible.

Jay Abraham 23:49

It's it's profound.

Jim Fitzpatrick 23:50

It really is. Jay Abraham, Strategic Edge. Thank you so much. This is uh I know that our viewers are gonna get so much out of this series. But thanks for the privilege of sharing. Absolutely. Can't wait for the next one. Thank you. Thanks.

Speaker 24:04

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