The Mentor of Mentors - Jay Abraham

hi i'm jay abraham i grow businesses for a living and you're watching behind the brand with brian elliott hey everyone i'm brian elliott welcome to another episode of the show jay welcome thank you thanks for having us to your amazing office uh you're very welcome and i'm delighted you're here i hope it's a fun experience for you and for everybody well i've been looking forward to this and i usually ask my guest how did you get this job well i tell everybody i'm uh the ex i'm the ultimate accidental tourist uh if you want the

story i'll condense it and give it to you very quickly you want it i do of course so i got married the first time at age 18. i had two kids at 20 i had the needs of somebody 40 at 20 and nobody cared and the only jobs i could ever get were not salary jobs they were performance-based jobs with crazed entrepreneurs who would basically let me eat what i kill and they'd give me a phone or a little a little cubicle and you very quickly if you only eat when you earn you what you

learn what works and what doesn't and where it works best and i was always never denominated by time because i wasn't being paid for hours so i always had three or four different activities going concurrently and i very fortuitously did them in totally we have a by the way we have an airport right here so you're going to hear these so i'll explain it now you'll hear we got the biggest helicopter company we got jet planes coming it's sort of fun but it may be irritating so i apologize but i fortuitously jumped from one industry

to another to another because i was bored and after about 10 i realized wow people in this industry don't have a clue brian how people in another industry think how they act strategy business model marketing approaches value propositions distribution and i started borrowing rather simplistic elements from the industries i'd been in and applied them in in various hybrids to the industries i was in and as incredible like wow you know i was like you know the reincarnation of something and everyone thought i was brilliant but i was really nothing more than the one-eyed man in

the bland land of the blind and i realized wow and that was the start of my growth that i got into the mail order business earlier in my life and i learned you want to ask well yeah and you know feel free to continue your sentence and i'll can we put first of all so where did you grow up indianapolis indiana okay so you're in indiana when all this is happening i am yes and put a time stamp on it just so we have some context 68 1968 to start okay i've been doing it for

45 plus years so i i always just like to remind the audience i think context matters a lot environment uh different environmental factors and uh culture sometimes has an influence or that matters i mean 1968 we're talking about vietnam war civil rights movement uh beatles beach boys uh summer of the beatles automobile just to come out yeah summer of love is you know a year you know six to 12 months all of that's happening right away uh and you know if we want to make comparisons is not too different than probably 2020 where there's all

this upheaval and division and kind of like very confusing times i agree yeah yes history repeats itself sometimes it does unfortunately it does okay keep going this is fascinating so okay so then i was in the mail order business and i learned a lot of very common elements of mail order but they weren't being used by any brick and mortar company so then i was able to take very basic stuff unique selling proposition variation and headline testing risk reversal allowable acquisition cost lifetime value bonusing and translate it to the brick and mortar business which was

the biggest business back then it wasn't e-commerce and again i was like a hero was incredible and that was the start and then i was on a penchant to learn everything i could about everything i could because i was able to integrate it and translate it all kinds of places and in the process just for context i had the very wonderful good fortune of being part of a couple of very interesting companies the first was icy hot when it first started and the second and perhaps even more interesting was entrepreneur magazine when nobody even knew

what entrepreneur met we had to send out promotions in letters with the webster's dictionary definition and phonetic pronunciation because nobody had ever heard of what an entrepreneur was even today i don't think they really know what it is they think it's being a proprietor but it's not but nobody even understood it so what is the j abraham definition of entrepreneur somebody who really is focused on creating an experiential superior value that is perceived desired exclusively from the company it's rendered from and genuinely enhances the richness the protection the the uh the uh the enjoyment the

entertainment of their lives depending on what the the product service is designed to deliver it's a french word isn't it it is yeah this is great uh so all this activity you're describing is really you know if we were to sort of net it out it's it's direct marketing it was yeah in the beginning yeah it was all understanding how to get someone to take a an ethical but a directed action and where did that take you where'd you go from there well let's see i went icy hot entrepreneur then i got deeply involved in

the newsletter and hard money investment business when they first re-legalized gold what were you doing at ico were you cmo are you i had a very interesting job he had no marketing money my job was to go to every radio station television station newsletter magazine newspaper package seller of anything to that geriatric market and get them to give us advertising when they had unsold availability and pay them on results yeah and it was really challenging but i was able to get i'll tell you the story it's sort of interesting uh and i'll give it to

you real quickly in context that also is a object lesson about allowable cost and lifetime value so we bought this old company that was almost dead we were going to kill it but we saw an analysis that every time we got 10 new buyers for three dollars that's all it cost back then eight of them bought every month almost forever until somebody came up with they died or somebody came up with a cure for arthritis bursitis and of the eight four of them would buy something else every month from the catalog and if the four

approximately two would buy twice a year bulk and by buy kind of product is when you analyzed it every time we got ten buyers even though two never repurchased more than once we were making fifty dollars a year from each one of them and when we realized that we had no marketing budget but we could spend quite a lot to get a first-time buyer because we made it over and over again and it was almost ad infinitum so my job was to go to radio television and persuade them that if they would run ads they

could keep all the money and we would actually pay them more and it was a hard sell but i got a thousand of them to do it and so we were generating buyers from all over the country radio television and in a year we had 500 000 repeat buyers from almost none and that was really interesting but more interesting we got the equivalent of about 150 million dollars of free advertising and we were a mail order product but there was so much demand that people go to rate to their groceries to their their pharmacies so

we forced unintentionally retail distribution that alone was pretty interesting because back then a consumer product was a lot more valuable than a mailer today it's an e-commerce but just by that shift it put a zero on the value of the business we sold it in about 15 months for 60 million dollars and that's pretty interesting because we paid about 30 for the company 30 30 000 but that wasn't the real key the acquirer was a pharmaceutical company that only understood consumer marketing they did not want the 500 000 buyers nor did they want the thousand

distribution radio tv media chain we just the only thing we had was a prohibition on selling an arthritic product like that we could do anything else we want we just went right back and used the same distribution the same buyers to to do other un non-competitive but unrelated but related products genius so it was pretty cool yeah you you created a distribution channel for yourself pretty amazing it's a great lesson for me and then an entrepreneur it was pretty cool too when i got there this is very interesting on how to redeploy an asset so

when entrepreneur magazine started it wasn't a magazine it was a membership it was 100 a year you got every month some when you signed up you got tchotchkes a plaque a discount card some other stuff but the real key was every month you got a member journal that was magazine formatted in the very center there was a 30 page overview of one emerging small business opportunity things like soup restaurants tune-up shops yogurt shops and it was very comprehensive we tell you the trend what it costs to get into on who the franchisers were risk investment

anticipated income exactly guide for uh for businesses yeah and but every month at the end they would just throw it into archive when i got there we had all these really cool uh they weren't manuals but they were sort of manual sitting in archive i took them and i added boilerplate to them what was your role there i was in charge of marketing and strategy so you worked with peter or uh no notice before he bought it i worked with the founders name was chase rivel okay see i was in the very first stages of

it when it first started interesting yeah and and we were we were the the key was we created a hundred startup manuals from just reusing the archives and we the we were selling them for 39 to 49 apiece when i got it when i started it was a million dollar membership but we sold nine million dollars of manuals just by re re uh re uh monetizing the sunk cost then we took them and we organized the manuals together into courses small investment food service automotive low risk high risk and we redeployed it again so i

learned that from masters and this i mean that's part of my progression i don't want to go too far but that was the next thing i did that's amazing there's so much that i want to unpack there you know the people who watch this show they are they're entrepreneurs okay great they're small business owners uh and some might be working for the man uh dreaming about well something like 50 are dreaming about it yeah and that's perfectly okay so um the show is also called behind the brand i want to talk about brands and branding

a little bit it seems like you know a little something about that and uh so let's start with what is the jay abraham brand well can you be a little more uh granular you want to what do you want to know about it so i want to talk about in the context of our audience is probably thinking about building their own brand whether it's a personal brand you know seth godin would argue with me he'd say i'm not a brand i'm a human being but i would push back and say that yes that is true

while that's true you are also a personal brand i agree and um and so i want to talk about the jay abraham personal brand but also kind of like helping the audience who's watching thinking about either starting a product or service how they can craft so let me ask answer with two parallel tracks that i'll interweave so i think it starts with understanding uh what do you stand for who do you stand for why do you stand for it what does standing for it mean and how do you personify or express it so i think

without understanding that if people want to learn how to really understand their brand or create a brand they better answer those questions and most people can't yeah i know what my brand is i'll tell you what it is my brand is that i have this i'm this advocate champion uh greatest fan of uh of the deserving entrepreneur i am uh i am enraptured with anybody who is trying to figure out how to add more value create more contribution make a more meaningful difference in the lives of the audience they address i am about elevating people's

stature to that of the most trusted advisor the only viable choice they could turn to in their world as far as my personal i guess what i represent i find hidden assets overlooked opportunities underperforming revenue activities underutilized relationships under recognized resources that can be converted into windfall newfound revenue and then i convert them into ongoing recurring income streams that last for life and i do it with almost no investment or risk that's what i stand for i love how succinct and perfect that is uh what strikes me a little bit about what you just said

i kind of get this image that jay abraham in many ways is the wing the wind beneath the wings of some of the more successful people in the world that we might know can you talk about some of the people that you've worked with who you know are standouts to you that you want to talk about well yeah i mean i can i can tell you that a couple of things i've had the very good fortune of either working with knowing or being benefited by association to some very expansive eclectic entrepreneurs i have personally had

involvement with tony robbins damon john a founder of federal express uh uh the co-uh the co-president of keller williams uh uh let's see who would be interesting you know the late stephen r covey was a colleague friend benefactor and i helped him his son stephen m.r covey uh dave asprey bulletproof coffee uh you know all those names yes i i didn't personally do it but the founder of planet fitness used my body of work uh you know there's probably 10 key real estate coaches and eight of them have been clients of mine i have had

interaction with about 300 of i guess you'd call them the top iconic experts authors i have i've got some friends who are hedge funds i've got friends who are private equity you've got a very broad spectrum of relationships and i've had similar in japan and in in china and in vietnam and in france so i've done it for many years in a broad spectrum of ways and let me ask you so with with you know the timeline of where you started and where we are currently so maybe bust some myths here like sometimes i feel

like everything and nothing has changed like it's all just the same like we were just talking earlier the history repeats itself so what do you see differently happening like heading into 2022 that we haven't ever seen before have you been surprised by anything in the last couple of years five years or decades yeah of course the first thing that's the most troubling is is the disrespect human beings have to one another that troubles me and not just politically but in in every sense you know religious and everything else i mean i don't think we have

regard for the value of each other and for our relevancy in life i believe that our goal in life is anytime we have a chance in any way to interact with anybody we try to make them better off i believe that everybody needs to be dealt with with relevancy significance and dignity no matter who they are and i don't think everybody believes that anymore it troubles me that's just a ideological philosophical belief well then i'm curious so were you not feeling that in 1968 because you know same kind of problems were happening then yeah i

mean in truth i was younger there and more self-consumed i've been benefited i am a aggregate um i'm i'm a hybrid uh through osmosis of all the wiser deeper people i've been exposed to a point of of understanding which might be clarifying for anybody so i've helped over 300 top experts none of them ever came to me for help with their methodology they had it nailed you know stephen m r covey knows uh you knows knows trust building uh you know it doesn't matter who they are i did the deming organization father of optimization process

improvement i've done the top guy in six sigma the top guy in constraint theory i can go on and on but in order for me to help them articulate the the tangible value to compare contrast to nominate elevate the value i had to first get a short course education so i have i'm i'm i i am today not 1968 but today i am this integration of such an enormity of of input and it's been people who are elevated thinkers very profound uh people with regard to ethics ethics integrity uh uh ideologies so i have a

much you know i've helped you know i i helped the number one guy in tm i've helped the number one guy and you know i'd help the number one chinese energy doctor i got all this integrated knowledge that i did not come close to having when i was a young 18 year old married person with one child in 1968 trying to make a living and probably more oblivious to then you know i'm at a later part of the runway of my life and i'm in a position of i don't know if i'm more elevated but

i have a more uh reflective perspective on the human condition on life and on on our place in the cosmos it makes a lot of sense also very relatable you know after 500 of these i get to sit down with some of the most amazing minds on the planet and my hope is that some of the fairy dust rubs off on me same thing i mean every time i i grow from every interaction yeah so that's very relatable um okay let's go more about building a brand so what advice do you have for entrepreneurs and

what are some of the mistakes that you see you're kind of a turnaround guy uh what was that show with uh was george clooney i think it was called up in the air he flies to different companies he's got to let everyone go he's got to you know give bad news but he's a turnaround guy and it sounds like that's part of your expertise as well it's interesting ironically most people come to me when they are in trouble or when they have gordian knots to untangle and yet i'm very good at taking a very successful

company and making it more successful but i i always laugh to people i have certain people who work who we're polar opposites my business flourishes in a down market and their business will flourish in an unbargained when people are making a lot of money they don't want to give anybody like me the time of day when things level off or start going south or competition breeds or they become somewhat uh antiquated because of technology or disruptor then i get calls galore so there's an irony there because the time to really grow is when you don't

need to but yeah oh we need to call jay yeah yeah so being a bit but i mean there was a you you may be too young in in the early 90s there's a man i think he's long deceased named red adair and he was the guy that could put out an oil well fire quickly but he charged a million dollars no one would come to him until they tried everything else and it didn't work then they'd call him and he'd come and put it out but he wanted his million dollars they wanted to try

it themselves and it was always laughable because it would take you know they'd spend 4 million in lost oil before they would call him and spend a million to get it done in a day or two right but i'm sort of like that so what are some of the i'm sure there's patterns so what are some of these things again people with businesses who are starting new ventures in 2022 for example or even you know still working on them uh or dreaming about them now what are some of the things tips and tricks you can

uh impart some of the things that you see it's we we actually i have a book that i don't sell i wrote it and then i decided i wasn't going to sell it it was called how to get the money for your great idea startup and what to do if you can't and because so many people want to start a business it's not the market i deal with anymore i deal with real operating businesses but i tell everybody if you're going to start a business before you start it you better have an advantage an advantage

can be many things the best advantage is a hungry market that you can access but if you don't have a hungry market you better have some you know it's it'd better perform better better be less expensive it must have some bells and whistles it must but i generated billions of dollars over my career for myself clients and and other colleagues have done it by finding out who already has a direct connection to the market you want and partnering with them distribution yeah there's a great statement and i use it a lot supposedly somebody came up

to baron rothschild and they said i want to borrow a hundred thousand dollars this is years ago when that was a lot of money and he said i won't won't lend you a set but i'll give you something a hundred times better i will walk back and forth with my arm around your shoulder across the stock exchange twice and when i'm done you can borrow all the money you want and so i've learned the hard way that rather than going out there and running ads trying to get noticed and trying to create credibility if i

can find many people and i have a time we did a quarter billion dollars of seminars one time which is pretty impressive in two years and i spent 300 grand to do it because i got everybody that already had access and the trust and the credibility to entrepreneurs tony robbins success magazine entrepreneur magazine investment newsletters in-flight magazines to all partner with me and i paid them on results so i always try to get people who are starting a business and i don't do a lot of startups but i say look if you're going to start

a business you better be able to know what your advantage is you better know how you're going to acquire at some cost effective basis either the buyer or the first buyer you better know if you're going to get leads how you're going to convert them you better know where you're going to make profit the cost of acquiring that first sale is so intense you better have some other way to monetize them and if you want to supersede all of that figure out who's already got that buyer that could be a partner of you what people

would buy before during after and partner with them figuring out what people buy instead and make that a fallback product and then you have a chance of being successful well you've just described my business model no but i'm just you're asking i'm telling you what i tell them yeah that's that's brilliant well i mean it's it's just pragmatic i've been around enough that i understand reality and most people i mean i'm working on a a number of books one of them is called uh and this is not a crass promotion because i don't know if

it'll ever come out i have 10 books i don't sell i or get them written and then i leave them in in archive because i don't like them enough but this is called creating business wealth without risk and the premise is sort of interesting this is more for just uh talking for startups if the success rate of a startup is one out of 20 or 24 5 and 90 don't make it five years then why would you want to start a business if you can get control of one that's already been validated and made at

five years but is underperforming and you can not have to put any money up but you can either have it acquired on an earn out or you can get third parties to finance it and then you can use the kind of stuff that a jay abraham or somebody uses to blow it up and then flip it and every two years make more money than you would in 40 and the premise is most people don't have enough they're very not anal but they're linear in their understanding of optionality they don't know all that's possible for the

same time effort opportunity risk and that's a tragedy i think brian i agree i would guess uh my first thought was you know putting up the obstacle of well i don't have the money to acquire a company but money turns out it's not that hard i have a philosophy i call it the unlimited business checkbook and i'll tell you a really cool story that that uh addresses and and allies that that fear and that belief so i used to go to china before all the the problems occurred and and and a coven and i would

go two three times a year and i did very expensive seminars and to my delight i appealed to people who really were trying to create value they weren't the people that knock you off and steal your ip they were just quality entrepreneurs and the first time i came a young man came to the mic we used to do this at the end of the third day and through translation said jay what do you do if your business is too small and the banks won't lend you money i said okay well tell me more and he

said jay i'm a small local motorcycle manufacturer now only in china with 100 million person city would you be a local motorcycle manufacturer and he said if i could get the money i'd go all over asia i'd open a plant there i'd hire sales people i'd over offices in every country i'd recruit dealers and sell my motorcycles and i must just sound crass but i said okay what's the problem goes i just told you they won't give you money i said you don't need money you really don't your problem is almost always brian the solution

to somebody's bigger problem you just have to figure out who they are what it is convince them they have the problem and that you're the solution i said go on a road trip go all over asia and find someone in a non-competitive but a compatible field who's got a large manufacturing plant that's not being utilized has offices and selling that all over has sales people dealers and partner with them it took me what a minute i came back 15 months later the end of the seminar this young man comes again now he looks like the

cheshire cat he said hey i did what you said and i do this all day long i don't remember anything i'm a poster boy for adult attention deficit so i said well what did you tell me he said i said what'd you do he said i went did what you said wanted road trip when i got to kuala lumpur in malaysia i found asia's largest lawnmower manufacturer they had a massive factory and second chip was only being partially utilized i made a deal with the owner he provided he had all the equipment he had the

people i brought the tools and dies most people should know it's those are the forms that mold the you know parts and the assemblies and make a product he said i had to teach him how to make it i had to teach the sales people how to sell it they had offices in 10 countries they had thousands of dealers in our first year together we both earned 10 million dollars there's a concept called the unlimited business checkbook whatever you think you don't have as far as a resource impairment is bs somebody's got it even experts

you say i can't afford experts if you can correlate there's plenty of second-tier experts that have underutilized time if you can correlate how their time can be measured to either increase your profit or reduce your expenses and you can convey to them that you're going to apply it and they can have a big enough share they'll work for you on the com you can get anything you want something i mean it is almost nothing that i couldn't show you you could have that you think you don't have capital for i love that thinking and it's

super obvious but also subtle so i just want to underscore what you're saying first of all you're absolutely right that a lot of people probably start their business with the wrong order of operations right they have this great idea for a product or service and they jump out into the market without even knowing there's any demand or not and that's risky i mean maybe they do have an unfair advantage that their thing is so spectacular it's gonna you know it's the it's the iphone whatever but most of the case most time it's not the case

um and so to establish demand is the right order you know it just makes things less risky but also kind of what you're talking about is also this idea of the abundance or scarcity mindset the scarcity mindset is the fear talking it's saying there's not enough money the banks won't lend it to me who am i to even you know try something like this is all the negative sort of fear-based scarcity thinking whereas the abundance thinking is all right here's the problem i just need to find out what that person needs and fill that need

and then we can actually get our goal accomplished together and and i mean i laugh because people get uh constrained so easily and unnecessarily yeah but but part of it is not it's well it's sort of ignorance but it's not stupidity they just don't have a context of understanding of see i'm very lucky i have to be very mindful i have helped over a thousand industries not businesses i've done it on five continents a long time 45 years so i have an understanding of so much more than most people who spend their whole life and

by the way i'm going to make a you may not get to this i have to make a provocative statement that i think i can prove there is a huge fallacy in the concept of best practices because most of the time best practices only relate to the best known practices in one or two industries and most of them are frankly incremental practices and they also become marginalized because when everybody learns the same thing then it becomes just a standard operating procedure and you have to find the next best practice if you're trying to be competitively

superior but if you borrow success approaches from outside an industry you can find explosive advantage that you can't find if all you do is stay within where everyone's following the herd so i believe that there's a flaw in the concept i would co-sign that can you think of any outstanding examples of that that's happening breakthroughs don't come from inside your industry i'll just hit you with a bunch of them they're going to be a little older because they're on top of mind and i'd have to delve the depths and plumb my mind for current ones

fiber optics that everyone thinks is cooler than heck it transformed you know wi-fi cellular uh you know telecommunication wasn't invented until it was came from aerospace and was extrapolated fedex transformed an industry by borrowing what's called the hub and spoke check clearing process the federal reserve bank used to make sure somebody doesn't bounce a check in the morning and they create a whole industry rogaine came from pimples viagra came from heart a ballpoint pen i had my pocket or roll on borrowed it but breakthroughs rarely come from inside the industry and most people are looking

in the wrong place you know for nirvana and for you know and for the motherlode it's outside i love that i love that advice um i just want to restate it so that it's clear what i hear you saying is um the status quo sometimes gets us stuck or it puts unnecessary limitations on our vision yet years ago i created a concept that i call funnel vision versus tunnel vision and there's a book that came out i don't read as much as i should it's called range and it talks about how the people who are

going to command the ownership of success today have the greatest range of understanding of skills of comprehension because you can't really yes everything does come back but today is not yesterday and if you just deal with hindsight you're not going to be able to understand how to not just navigate but how to commandeer and control and command the future but the more knowledge you bring to bear the more understanding of possibilities the more predictable you know action reaction cause and effect you understand and you can really overlay to today the more power you're going to

have yeah i love that it also seems like it's a message of resourcefulness and resilience because i think some of us will get stuck in you know like well we've always done it this way and so i can't break the mold and so that's that's limiting me in my thinking and and that's a myth but also um you know sometimes you don't know what it's like until you get in the thick of it yeah i mean the most selfish thing you can do is be selfless right it's interesting people don't understand that yeah uh that's

super timeless advice i love that so much what is like a deeply held belief what's called business belief or philosophy that you had and maybe it's five years or ten years ago that you no longer have heading into 2022. uh i think i was um self-consumed with my importance and i realized today that to achieve greatness you need it's a collaborative process you don't possess enough of the ability yourself you need people better than you there's an adage that i heard a couple years ago and it changed it's hire the best and cry only once

and i believe today that the the role of a entrepreneur a leader a manager is not ever to squeeze everything they can out of everybody it's to grow and develop everything they can within because most people get a fraction of the performance somebody's got the capability of doing and they think the person may be not terribly motivated or lazy and it's not that on their own they don't know how to be more productive they don't know how to be more efficient they don't know how to be more collaborative they don't know how to have more

trust they don't know how to listen better they don't know how to communicate clear they don't know how to prioritize their the time they don't understand highest and best use and if you don't help them then you'll never get them to a higher place and they'll never get you to a higher place but i think collaborate creative collaboration is something that i i was always a very great collaborator with my clients but i never built i mean i have a business that is predicated totally on myself what i do is so empirical experientially unique that

i can i mean i can teach you my fundamentals but the nuances are what make me able to do it for you because i can tell you okay i know what's going to happen probability outcome you do this this is going to happen but maybe this you better be hedged and most people don't have that experience but i would have built a totally different business had i had a greater respect for the importance of collaboration with people who had pieces of the puzzle i didn't yeah so it's that idea of we is greater than me

yes also i think that more than ever you got to play a long game not a short one what does that mean say more it means a lot it means that you invest now but you're playing a game means nobody in their right mind should sell something one time because the cost the effort of building acquiring them is expensive converting them is expensive and it's and and for the same effort if you have the right relationship you can monetize it ethically over and over and over again and most people don't understand that most people see

themselves rigidly i am a seller of one item whereas people are buying related items before during after even instead what's the ic hot example yeah well there's another one let's say you were selling uh a as you said example let's say you were selling a supplement for weight loss well unless you're really a diluted optimist and you think people are just buying a supplement for weight loss concurrently they're probably buying you know they're buying portion control food they're probably maybe they have uh equipment they're buying maybe they have a trainer online and when they stop

with yours because they don't adhere they're gonna get another one well if all you sell is your supplement it's finite and most people are going to go for three or four months at most if you sell another supplement to them after if you sell equipment if you sell a t-shirt that fits great if you sell all of that you might 10 times the profit from the investment in acquiring that buyer and you'd be helping them more because they're going to do it anyhow and if you're at all preeminent and you only sell product services that

are higher performing they're going to get a better outcome yeah yeah again um a simple concept but not always easy as it seems i love that uh so one of your clients or proteges or people that you've mentored damon john i remember sitting down a conversation with damon a few years ago and uh some advice that he gave me at the time was really interesting i want you to weigh in on it he said you know businesses don't always need to grow into you know humongous empires sometimes staying small and nimble is a better strategy

how do you where do you weigh in on that well i'll tell you what i always focus on first and it will probably uh conform to what you're saying and then we can evolve whatever font of discussion emanates from that so i'm a strong believer that most people focus too much on top line and not on bottom most of my work is trying to get a lot more yield out of what they've already done who they're doing it with where they're doing it and not working as much because people used to come to me at

my seminars and they would say jay i'm doing a million dollars and i want to do 10 million how am i going to do it and i'd say stop before you do that tell me why you want to grow 10 times and most often i'm just paraphrasing and i'm hypothetical here they'd say well i'm making 150 grand i want to make a million five so i gotta and i said well not necessarily you're projecting that no variation in your revenue system changes but if instead of getting a you know a conversion rate of x you

got two x instead of getting an average sale of a hundred dollars you got three hundred dollars instead of getting one purchase no more you got three purchases a year instead of being able to not monetize the non-converted you were able to monetize them you may be able to get close to that 10 million for maybe just a double in volume and i said also you have to realize to go 10 times is not quite as easy you'll need 10 times the facilities you're going to need management you're going to need a lot more capital

you're going to need a lot more infrastructure technology rent obligations wouldn't you like to first multiply the bottom line before you worry about the top but most people don't know that's possible i've lived my life learning 80 different ways to make the bottom line grow and in fact what i do now is i've got a belief system that there's a you want to hear my belief i'm going to share it and you can cut it out i believe there's a fallacy in the in the concept of the 10x moonshot everyone teaches that but no one

says hey in order to do that you've got to figure out what it is first if you're wrong you're screwed if you figure out even if it's right you've got to find the experts to do it whether it's vr ai it's almost always denominated they're expensive as hell they usually haven't worked together they often times haven't worked in your industry of i don't know lately but i looked at data and 80 of them failed even if it doesn't it's like building a custom house it takes longer costs more you got to have a parallel like

two different businesses set up until it's working in order to fund it you either have to borrow dilute uh your your equity and sell interest or you got to take it out of cash flow and my belief is why don't you first get a 10x bottom line because that's no risk no investment just doing things better with what you're doing who you're doing it with making everything work better that you're already doing and then use that money to fund the risk and the speculation because 80 of them didn't work they might be higher success now

but not quite as brilliant as the theoretical concept sounds yeah it sounds like you're very scrappy you're very resourceful you see the white space you see the underutilized assets or people um that's the impression i'm getting well i mean i've been trained by masters and i've gotten so i mean you know i've just been involved in so many industries i've been involved with so many different specialists i've been asked to come in and deal with so many problems i've been involved with so many competitive situations i have uh probably i mean the good news is

i have a very uniquely agile and resourceful and innovative mind the bad news is i can't really preserve that knowledge other than while i'm alive which the clock's ticking on me so i mean it's good and bad pretty cool i mean i understand stuff that you can't believe but when i'm no longer a breathing living person all that goes my general stuff will hopefully endure if anybody runs with it but most people forget you talk about dale carnegie if you talk to a millennial or a younger one they'd go who and even stephen covey yeah

they go who yeah and so the point is that you know it's my wife and i are fascinated a little younger than i but i love watching really wonderful classic movies from the 50s and 60s and 70s and i i got kids that are in their early 30s little and high 20s and i'll make them watch and they'll be shocked that's so good but most of them are forgotten and there's a tragedy there because a lot of value gets forgotten because people want the new drug yeah and today in the world that people are i

think a lot of people are tragically deluded because a lot of people sell a tactic as if that's going to really be the profound uh solution to their woes and people don't realize that it's an interesting it's an interesting short-term advantage for a few people until everybody learns it then you've got to find another and another as opposed to figuring out how to really strategically build a masterful company that endures yeah and and you know that that variable of patience it's so difficult to gauge and maybe you can help identify some signals so you know

it's a dilemma that i think about personally all the time or with my clients or talking with other experts how long do you give this great idea of yours until you cut bait or pivot what are some of the signals that it's not working yeah well i mean one of the things that i think is very interesting and i try to do this all the time with smaller overlay and say intoxicated uh optimistic entrepreneurs that there are many ways to pre-validate an assumption before you you know mortgage your house quit your job you know tell

everyone to screw off because you're gonna because a lot of people don't understand you can test relative interest and and most people don't uh today i had a consult with a guy and he has this great idea of teaching people their relationship with water and he's gonna charge two thousand dollars for that and he's in the business of teaching people how to build self-sufficient homes now that's there's a market for that but two thousand dollars to learn how to have a better relationship with water maybe and he was going to basically spend four hundred thousand

dollars to build this course he was going to go out and try to get partners everywhere and i said why don't you first see if you can even sell it conceptually just expression of interest to your existing buyers who you know are fanatically eco-friendly or eco-centric because if they won't buy it odds are nobody will but he was ready to go but but i try to slow people down i've been trained by masters that before you blow everything i mean there's a great there's a great great uh quote the court of last resorts is the

market they vote by their response their checks their calls their opt-ins their registrations for your webinar their visits to your showroom we live in a meritocracy and you can test a lot of assumptions the problem that people don't understand if the assumption is wrong everything that flows is wrong from it so i want to validate it as quickly and safely i mean or vetted yeah and you can i mean it there's another phrase is you can do things that are not definitive but they can be indicative so if for 10 000 today i can at

least see if there's any relative interest for a concept before i cut the cord and and put a million dollars in it even if it's not absolutely definitive i could take an indicative sort of an indicator i can then spend 20 grand and see if it still validates do a little more and then if it validates three times maybe it makes sense and i think an investor would be a lot happier to put money on that than some cockamamie pie in the sky unvalidated concept but most people understand that pre-validating is the greatest thing you

can do for yourself for your emotional financial life commitment of opportunity cost energy emotion and also to get investors yeah yeah it's funny it kind of reminds me of this conversation i had with my younger daughter and she was observing my work and looking at me and she said dad you know you're this entrepreneur you're building these businesses and doing these things you must really love risk and i said whoa actually no i don't love risk what i try to do in my business is mitigate risk so if there's a delta like this i don't

want to jump not knowing whether or not i'm going to survive what i try to do is move that space closer so it's more like a hop to really mitigate the risk so i said i'm very calculated and i'm trying to make smart decisions so that when i do take the leap it's a hop not a jump to maybe my death and it kind of sounds like that's what you're advising i i i learned uh two they're they're corresponding philosophies one is basically asymmetric return thinking that's what a hedge fund looks for they want alpha

they don't want mean but i also learned that you you you also can get de-risk on the downside but you can't if you don't really understand where your risk exists most people don't so you have to really i mean it most people go into things far too i don't want to say ignorant but let's say unaware of the consequences on either side what you could get out of an action an effort an investment access to a market media versus what the downside can be and they don't know how to optimize the up and down side

the down another point and you're not going to ask this so i'll tell you very interesting there's a fascinating polar opposite if you want to optimize but you want to innovate they are polar opposites optimizing is making everything you're doing do better when we work for a client we split it we maximize what they're already doing before we add new things but if you want to innovate it really says i want to make everything i'm doing obsolete and get rid of it so integrating the two is very very tricky just a point yeah well said

i love it i want to respect your time um maybe let's as we're rounding third coming home here final parting words to um people running a business yeah so i've been blessed to learn more ways to make a business perform better for less investment or risk most people don't know you can make ads better you can make conversion better can make value of people better media better sales people better distribution channels better positioning better offers better when you realize most people struggle in entrepreneurship with the wrong question they are tormented non-verbally brian with the constant

question am i worthy of this goal can i make this business succeed can i earn the income i need can i make enough to retire can i compete against all the new interlopers out there and the disruptors when you realize how much more is really possible from time effort access capital human capital relational capital all these things the right question excuse me is not am i worthy of the goal it's the opposite is the goal worthy of me because there's so much more and i think my life in service to others not me but my

life and what we've accomplished for people proves it but you have to know what the options and and alternatives are beyond what you're doing now and most people don't i mean we were just sitting back you know chopping it up reminiscing about the good old days and all that you know tracking my roots where i came from and where i'm going [Music] ain't nothing changed but the weather the dangling carrot that hang from the rear view your dreams in the past ain't nowhere near