#152 Jay Abraham

Hala_Taha: Hi, Jay. Welcome to young and profiting podcast.

Jay_Abraham: Thank you very much. I'm tickled and flattered to be here. I hope we'll have a lot of fun to get

Hala_Taha: I am so excited. I mean, I've been studying you for the last week and I'm so impressed with everything that you've done. You've worked with stars like Damon, John. You've been the man behind things like icy hot. You are just such an expert in so many different things. And I can't wait to pick your brain, but first I want to take it way back.

I want to start off, uh, when you were 18 years old, uh that's when you actually started as an entrepreneur, you're in your seventies now. So you've been doing it for decades and

Jay_Abraham: bonds. I am very long time.

Hala_Taha: Um, but why did you decide to be an entrepreneur straight out the gate? Uh, talk to us about that.

Jay_Abraham: Pretty unemployable. Uh, I mean it, I got started at 18 cause I was married and I had two kids at 20 and no negotiable, a skill I don't have, I'm not saying it with pride. I have no formal education and I had the need of somebody 40 when I was 18 and nobody cared. And the only people that.

would give me opportunity were crazy, but very impressive entrepreneurs in my city, Indianapolis, where I was born and raised.
And they would never give me a salary, but they'd give me a chair and maybe a desk or a spinning table and, and so much forever. Sale I made or so much for every new distribution source I generated and so much for every lead I brought in or whatever the correlation was. And I was never paid a fixed salary.

So I was always doing two to five things concurrently to pay the rent. And when you only eat, when you earn, you figure out very quickly, what works and what doesn't, and more specifically what works better. And then you, if you're pragmatic, you default towards that. And as I was doing it, last thing I'll say, and it gets probably to something you'll ask me.

I jumped around, not from business to business, but industry to industry. And as I did, so I made a profoundly valuable for myself and hopefully for the business world discovery and realization that people in one industry pretty much follow the herd they do plus, or minus, you know, 10, 20, 30% better or worse.

What everybody else does the same way. But if you experienced lots of unrelated industries, you see a broad spectrum of alternative ways to markets out, distribute, uh, you see different strategies, business models, value propositions, lead generation conversion, access vehicles. And I figured out quite accidentally that I could borrow a success approaches from outside an industry, migrate them to an industry that was unfamiliar, maybe borrow two or three and turn them into a unique hybrid.

And it would just explode the businesses that I was then associated with off the chart. And they all thought I was so brilliant and truthfully, I was nothing more than a master full, I guess you'd call me a, an importer. I just imported approaches and concepts from outside and then fast forward. And you're not asking, but I'll give you a little prelude to the current.

I realized that the concept of, um, best practices as it's taught most of the time, even today is relatively flawed because it tends to be the best practices in a given industry. Not necessarily the highest, best, fastest, safest, uh, most high residual generating, uh, actions and alternatives. It just tends to be the best practices that everybody else is following, and they tend to be more linear and more incremental in their yield.

Then, uh, exponential. And I started really getting serious about that years ago and it sort of evolved. That's a bigger answer than you wanted, but I hope it was useful.

Hala_Taha: Seaver useful. Don't worry about it. You can talk as long as you want on this podcast, I always kind of steer you back into the right direction. So if we want to just focus a little bit about that time when you were. Basically getting all these experiences, you were freelancing, you mentioned that you didn't get any formal business training.

You didn't go to college. You didn't go to grad school. But when I was reading your work, I literally felt like I was getting a refresher for my MBA. And I felt I was like reading the textbooks that I read during my MBA. And it just goes to show that you don't need formal education to understand business.

So I do want to talk about that a little bit. Like what is the importance of getting experience?

Jay_Abraham: Uh, it is Omni important. I don't know if you've read the book. I read it a couple of years ago. Range. Have you read that?

Hala_Taha: No.

Jay_Abraham: So it was very, it was a best seller for a year or two, and it's a guy that studied high performance today. And he found out that the people that had the most expansive diverse experiential and empirical background were much higher performers today than specialists, because they had the context of understanding of a broad spectrum of, of scenarios, probabilities outcome that allowed them to deal with scenarios today that are not, you can't really replicate yesterday.

It's not like hindsight from yesterday. It gives you, um, gives you guideposts to today because it's a new world. So it was very interesting, but in my experience?

The more, you experienced diverse spectrums of business, the more strength, and the more advantage you have, because you understand so much more than anyone else.

I mean, I can, I used to laugh. I would say I'm the best person to sit next to on an airplane, even if you don't want to talk, because I've been blessed to be exposed to a thousand plus industries, real industries, not just doing a keynote, but working on the front lines of capitalism so I can engage people and ask questions. No.

one's ever asked them and track with them and stimulate connectivity. They've never thought about it and I'm learning all the time, but I think hopeless curiosity. Is one of the most powerful attributes skills, uh, uh, power sources, an individual can have it, he or she channels it in the right direction and tries to really understand and process what they're observing, seeing, learning, you know, what's driving things happening.

Uh, and, and I was blessed. I had, I wasn't, I wasn't formally trained, but I was, uh, I was, so I was like, you come across, you come across very vivacious and, and pure and, and, and, and open to learning. And I was that way when I was young and everybody took me under the wing. Cause I wasn't a threat. I tell people, this is a true story.

I worked all night for three years and just drudgery as types of jobs. So I could see. In the offices of some really stunning entrepreneurs in Indianapolis and watched them do business. And they found me so fun and interesting and charming, and an N is inexplicably ad just intriguing that they'd let me watch something.

And when a call was done or a meeting was done, they would tell me what happened and the psychology and I just like a sponge soaked it up. And then you fast forward, I've had some of the greatest mentors in the world than the former, you know, the, the, the late Stephen, Mr. Covey was one, you know, I've, you know, I've had a collaborative relationship with Tony Robbins for 30 years.

Uh, you know, I was, uh, collaborating with one of the founders of FedEx. I can go back much past a lot of your, your viewers probably, uh, childhood, but It's I have wonderful people that taught me pieces of the puzzle. And not in big forms like that, but in very, very cool, granular, contextual ways that made it come alive and dimensionalized it inanimated.

And so I understood it at such a deeper level.

Hala_Taha: It's super interesting how you created your career and got all these experiences. So I guess one question I have for you about that is you worked many jobs at a time. Did that ever become a conflict when you were working for other people? And did you consciously make the decision to go from industry to industry, to industry, or did that just happen?

And then you realized that you like getting experiences in new industries.

Jay_Abraham: I'm going to answer retrospect fully because I don't know retroactive. I never thought about it deeply, but I think because I'm probably a poster boy for adult attention deficit. And I have a very, either a higher, low boredom level. Um, I can't sit in any one environment very long. And, uh, I found that I went, it was very, I was obsessed with learning the quintessence of what drove a business or category inside a business.

But once I understand. At my, my attitude was beyond a certain point. It was incremental. And I think I naturally have all my life defaulted towards trying to operate in what I call the exponential zone and everything where everything I was doing was going to produce a sort of an asymmetric yield for me or whoever I was helping.

But it never was a conflict. Although it was funny in the early days, you're too young to know this, but in the late seventies, they really utilized gold. And so you couldn't buy gold for a period of time. It was illegal. Then they legalized it and people were buying gold bull and they were buying gold coins and they were buying rare coins.

They were buying gold stocks and all this stuff. And I was in the gold business and we had one client that we have very cool. We took them from 300,000 to 500 million in, in about a year and a half, but they were doing one, one type of selling. They were selling what's called physical delivery where you just deliver it.

And I wanted to do more things. I wanted to keep compete against ourselves and they wouldn't. So I picked up cause I was never, I was always being paid for results, never paid for time. So nobody had an obligation. I had no obligation to anything, including exclusivity actually, because I was only getting paid a fraction of what I made them.

So I never would allow it to be exclusive. So when I couldn't get one gold company to do it another way, one was bank financed. One was made. I've had all kinds of different, different is interest. And I finally found, I had a one-time five different companies doing five different types of gold and rare coin and gold stock and collectibles at the same time, because each one wanted to just be one part of the puzzle.

And so that was fun, but I've never had a conflict and it's even funny with all, all true. Most people won't even, you know, everybody wants me to sign initially a confidentiality, but I have a beautiful one. And because I've been exposed to so many things, I'll say, sure, I'll sign yours, but you got to sign mine.

And I probably know more stuff that you don't, you know, that I don't, nobody signs it, which I'm not saying an arrogant. We just, you know, it's just, then we have a nice conversation because there's a higher level of mutual respect, but no, I've never had a problem with any kind of a conflict. I have a very, if you study my work and you know that I've done all this work with the strategy of preeminence, I I'd like to hope that I operate at a very elevated strata of integrity and ethical and high ethical, plain.

Hala_Taha: so you've worked with over 10,000 clients across about a thousand or so industries. And to me, that is so interesting. The fact that you take strategies from one industry and you bring them to another and you help people maximize their business and disrupt industries.

And so I'd love to hear some real concrete examples about bringing one strategy from one industry to another, and how you help to elevate a business doing that.

Jay_Abraham: sure. Well, how about if I started to beginning and then fast forward will be like a bullet train, leaving the tracks. Okay.

Hala_Taha: I love that.

Jay_Abraham: So I see that was my first introduction to the concept of marginal net worth allowable costs and 3d thinking, uh, 3d thinking so we Can establish it right now. There's two kinds of a business owner, probably two kinds of a P and L oriented manager, ones that look at revenue minus expenses equals profit.

And that's a 2d thinker and ones that think of an asset. They are acquiring how that, that keeps producing residual yield. That's 3d thinking. It's sort of a more, the way a PE firm would look at something. So I was introduced to my great benefit early in my career when we did icy hot to 3d thinking, the man that.

Engaged me bought this old, old company IcyHot that was almost broke and it was selling the same, the same composition as the base product you see today, but it was selling it as a mail order product for $3. And, uh, it was not doing well. In fact, he was contemplating closing it until he did an analysis of any quantified, the performance metrics of the buyers.

And what he found to his delight was that every time, even though they were almost, uh, out of business, because they hadn't grown or added a new buyers every time they got a new buyer, that every time they got 10 buyers who paid $3, eight of them would buy a jar or more every month. Ad infinitum until somebody came up with a cure for arthritis, bursitis, rheumatism, but of the eight, four of them would buy some other product concurrently in the, uh, in the line and of the four I'm just, I'm summarizing and simplifying it.

Two would buy twice a year or more bulk, but bottom, bottom line was every time he brought in 10 new first time buyers at $3, even though two that didn't buy ever again, each one was worth $50 in revenue, which was high profit every year. And with that piece of distinction, he didn't have any marketing budget.

You're a marketer, I'm a marketer. He gave me the task of going to radio stations, television stations, publications. This is pre-internet. There was no digital media. Uh, people had sold products to stick things in the packages with them and persuade them whenever they had unsold advertising or underutilized capacity run ads for us or inserts for us.

Selling our product for $3 and we let them keep not the $3, but $3 and 15 cents, which was more than anybody else was. And we let them not only keep that money, but actually have the money go to them. All we cared about was they rushed us the name so we could fulfill prop promptly so we could get the second order.

But even though we were losing 55 cents, uh, to, to do all this, we were getting our repeat orders, half of them within 10 days, our cash flow is great.

And by understanding that and being a relatively persuasive at that point, uh, sales man, we were able to get a thousand plus radio television. Uh, newspapers magazines to run ads for us continuously. And we went from a few thousand buyers to over 500,000 in less than a year, but that wasn't the best part of it.

we accidentally got, what would today be about $150 million worth of free advertising. We didn't pay for which forced retail distribution, which means people would go to their stores, their grocery, their drug, and ask for it.

They didn't have it. They'd call it. We we, in 15 months we sold the business that we bought for almost nothing, 20, 30,000 for a 60 million to a pharmaceutical company that resold it again. And now I don't know who's got it today, but that wasn't even the most interesting thing. Talk about linear thinking, the pharmaceutical company that bought it only thought in terms of consumer products, they had no interest in the 500,000 buyer database, nor did they have any interest in the over 1000, uh, media performance, only distribution, um, a channel we had built, we got to keep all that.

And all we were prohibited to do is sell, uh, a comparable type of an arthritis product to move went back. And that was my first experience. And as I got older, I realized even that was flawed because if you understand yield and you understand that every time you get 10, you get eight forever. And every one of the eight plus the other two were in $50 a year.

Even if we didn't have the cash, we could have paid out up to $49 in the first year to get a buyer and still made a dollar, a buyer in year one and $50 in year two and $50 in year three, and probably done a more explosive, but I didn't understand a allowable cost and margin and where that was the first thing.

Hala_Taha: There's one lesson I want to drill out here. And that's you employed something, you call a host beneficiary relationship in that scenario. So basically you partnered with these radio stations and these TV stations, and you said, Hey, I'll give you the profit from the first order, if we can have the rest of the orders.

So it was a win for them. You got the free ad space, they got the first sale, and then you got the repeat customer. So talk to us a little bit about what a host beneficiary relationship is. So my listeners know more about that specific strategy.

Jay_Abraham: So the concept of those beneficiary has many permutations, JV, strategic Alliance, power partnering, uh, endorsement. Co-branding, I've been privileged that either myself or my, excuse me, colleagues and I have engineered billions of dollars, this, but the concept is.

Someone else always has direct, trusted, credible access to the same buying influence. You want to reach that someone has spent a lot of time, money, effort building that credibility. If you can figure out who that someone or some entity or some, anything media association, influencer author doesn't matter is, and you can persuade them of your deservedness and you can structure the, uh, the deal, right?

You can get them to take your product service to their audience. And if you do It masterfully, it's not a static thing like today, they do, an affiliate, and that's usually a one time static promotion, but if you do it right, you become a permanently ensconced part of their whole business.

I can tell you some stories like. And you're getting a free ride off of tens, hundreds of millions, of dollars of cumulative investment they've made and effort people, advertising facilities, technology, service, people, product development, all this, and they associate and ascribe their trust and credibility to you.

The easiest example I can make is a story that is told by, uh, different ways, but, uh, it's told mostly about Baron Rothschild, the, the welcome. Uh, investment person in, in France that somebody supposedly wanted Baron Rothschild to lend them a hundred thousand dollars years ago. And he said, I won't lend you a penny, but I'll do something infinitely better.

I will walk hand in hand or arm around you back and forth twice across the stock exchange. And when we're done, people will loan you all the money you want. But that's the story of that to give you very specific. I'll give you a couple of quick examples. I won't get into detail When I was in the seminar business, it was pretty significant. I was about your age and we did $250 million, a quarter billion dollars in three years. And I spent a total fixed cost of 300 grand, but I did Tony Robbins partnered with me success magazine, Nightingale counter.

They used to be the biggest audio publisher, uh, five, excuse me, 50 different newsletters partnered with me. Uh, the in flights partnered with me and I only paid them a share of the people that registered. And because we were able to get such credibility. When I started the average, a seminar was $500 and we were selling them for 15 and $20,000 and selling them out.

That's the power of credibility. It describes automatic, um, uh, integrity and unique Supreme value. A more fascinating one. I used to do seminars four times a year, very expensive ones in China. And I did them for 15 years. And the first time I did it, very fascinating. It's all through translation. At the end, we would do Q and a, a young man comes to the mic and he.

Uh, sincerely says, and it's question, Jay, what do you do if your business is too small and the banks won't lend you money to grow? And I said, okay, well tell me more. And he said, well, I'm a small local motorcycle manufacturer. Now only in a country like China, where you have a hundred million population city, would you be a local motorcycle manufacturer?

And he said, I want to try to raise the money to go all over Asia and then find out a manufacturing facility there, open offices and all the countries hire sales people, recruit dealers. And so I'm, I'm going okay, but what's the problem. And the guy's getting irritated. Cause I told you I can't get the money.

And I said, you don't need the money. You really don't. Your problem is always, or your goal is always the solution to somebody's bigger problem. You just have to figure out what it is. And I said, go all over. Asia, find somebody in a non-competitive complementary business. That's got a huge under utilized production.

Has salespeople, offices, dealers, and make a partnership. It took me like whatever, 30 seconds I came back, 15 months later. True story. The guy. Did what I said, he came to the mic again. He said, I did what you said. And I didn't remember because very candidly, my whole life is spent solving problems, identifying opportunities, untangling, Gordian, knot.

So I said, well, tell me what I told you. And he told me, I said, what'd you do? He said, I went all over Asia. When I got to Kuala Lumpur, I found Asia's largest lawnmower manufacturer. They had a massive second shift. They weren't using, they made a deal where they provided the people. I just had to bring the tools and dies.

He said they had salespeople in offices and I don't remember 10 countries. They had thousands of dealers in our first year together.

We both made $10 million for almost no investment. That's the kind of power in this. But I can give you thousands of examples. We've done it mostly at a larger scale, but I mean, You know, through, I mean, now McDonald's will partner with Disney.

You said you got, I mean, everyone partners and you know, I was young enough or old enough, excuse me. I can remember when you were in a grocery and they didn't have banks, they didn't have subways. I remember the same on highways, but now people have figured out that you get all this advantage by taking advantage of someone else's.

So the question always to ask is what do people buy before, during, after, instead, what is similar but not competitive. And when you ask those questions, you get macro answers. Then you look up companies in those fields, and then you start figuring out how you can give them advantage. And if you understand things, like I said, if you have a product that sells many times and you understand, you don't have to play a front end game, you can play a much more sophisticated, strategic long-term game.

You can do all kinds of things. I hope that answers your question. I got lots more examples.

Hala_Taha: It does, I, this is such an interesting topic to me because I feel like it's so under utilized, a lot of entrepreneurs feel like they've got to do everything on their own, and they've got their eyes closed to all of these collaboration opportunities that are available to them. I love the example that you gave with McDonald's.

So a company like Disney is going to offer free toys to McDonald's so they can promote their movies. McDonald's customers are happy. They get a toy and their happy meal, and Disney's happy because they're promoting their shows. So it's a win-win for everyone. I guess my, my last question. What are the types you were alluding to them, but what are the types of questions that you should ask yourself when you're trying to find that right company to partner with?

I think a big one is, you know, if, if a company has the same audience as you, but they're not your competitor, then how can you team up with them? How, what benefits can you

Jay_Abraham: But you could do it. I don't want to. I challenge it, but you can even team up with somebody who is a competitor. When I was in the seminar business, we taught a certain methodology and system for growing a business. And it was very powerful, but it wasn't the only, and after people bought everything I had to sell, I would go out and find people that had really cool alternative means.

And I would go to my database and say, look, I taught you what I know, but it's not the only way you can build on it. You have certain things that are going to work better in different scenarios. And we sold tons of our competitors, but if you ask yourself, okay, it's, as I said, who sells to my audience in a related form?

That's the first question then who sells to my audience in an unrelated form? Because you might find somebody that's not even. Logical, but has the audience you want, I mean, during the, during COVID, for example, there were all these high-end, uh, you know, really, really, uh, uh, uh, again, really top, you know, Michelin type independent restaurants that couldn't do anything and they were dying and I helped a bunch of them?

that had some of the most amazing clientele, but had no nothing to sell because they couldn't open.

And we structured deals with them where they introduced them to, you know, luxury car dealers and they introduced their clients to jewelers and, and private villas because people only wanted to travel there and they made tons of money and survived just because they'd never thought about that correlation, if that makes sense.

But you figure out who already has a trusted access directly, incredibly to your audience. How can you figure out how to directly or indirectly directly means go right at it for an offer? Indirectly means educate value, create you to do whatever you're going to do. And then how can you make it worth their while either economically psychically value add, you know, we've done deals where we went to people and said, Hey, as you said with the toys, we'll give you a massive bonus.

You can give an ad, you know, advantage to what you sell, particularly what you sell. Seems like a commodity. Now it's a proprietary cause we're giving you something that would cost us $10 and you're not paying anything that cost us 20. And we did it because we knew that every time we gave away 10 or $20 to 10 people, five of them would come back and buy something for a hundred or 200 or 500 over and over again.

But you have to understand. Uh, strategically, you have to understand what I call consequential or critical thinking. And most people aren't really skilled in that.

Hala_Taha: Yeah. I just want to pause here for my listeners and let them know that Jay is the real deal. Like I interview expert after expert after expert. And when I was reading Jay's stuff, I just kept getting so excited. It's not that it's so complex, but it's just so good in terms of the strategies they're so actionable.

And that's what we're all about here at young and profiting podcasts. So the next piece of wisdom that I want to get from you is something that really excited me. And that's your strategy of preeminence. And for me, when I read your material on that, I was thinking, oh my gosh, this is what I've been doing with yap media, but I just never knew it.

And now I can kind of fine tune and actually give some direction to what I was doing. So for my listeners who don't know, strategy of preeminence is all about becoming the preeminent choice in your industry. So being the one who is like, there's, there's no other better option, you are the best option for your clients.

So I definitely want to stay on this topic for a while. Dig deep. First of all, what is a, pre-med it, what does a preeminent business look like?

Jay_Abraham: Well, it's interesting. The preeminent business. Is is seen in whatever category, high price, low price, product commodity, um, I mean, not commodity product service as the only viable choice you can make as if, if it has any correlation to guide you. It's, it's the most trusted advisor, the go-to source that you would turn to for life, for yourself and anyone else you would refer to them.

And it's a very, I got, I should probably give you a history real quickly because I wish I could say it was original. I had a discussion earlier with a really cool guy, uh, that is, there's a guy that has a company called EOS. And it's really interesting. We were talking about the fact that I don't believe there are as many there as many original thinkers, but I think there's some very original synthesizers and I would call myself a synthesizer, can take filaments grief, weave it into a fresh fabric.

So I had a. Twenty-five years ago that was in the publishing business and their business was three times larger than their closest competitor. They charge 50 to a hundred percent more. They had far more repeat and multi-buyers and they ended up selling it. I'm talking about decades ago for $650 million, which was a lot.

And when I was introduced to the, my exchange them, my, my, my fees are very high. You probably know that I traded him a half, a million dollars of my time for the privilege. And I learned that this is the greatest investment. Most people don't understand that you can, you can get such explosive understanding that can be monetized.

You know, exchanging with people, whatever you got for the privilege to pick their mind openly and not covertly. And I spent a week interviewing everybody that was critical in the business, the CEO, the, the, the, the, the architect of their philosophy, their, their, uh, you know, their executives, their managers.

And I took thousands, literally thousands of pages of notes. And I distilled it into what I called the strategy preeminence. And it starts with this belief that you want to be the most trusted advisor, the only possible source they could turn to. And that the only way you can do that is by caring more, doing more, being more in the eyes of the audience.

And you can't do that if you're not willing to, first of all, understand, you know, examine, understand, appreciate, acknowledge, recognize. And, um, and, and really, uh, really go deep to, to understand who, what, why, how your audience is, and not just superficially, but seeing beyond just a transaction, but as a human being, the next is you have to have a positioning that is distinctive, not the same thing.

Everyone else is. You have to have a point of view that animates their spirit and get some thinking differently, whether it's more depth or whether it's a different take, uh, you've gotta be willing. And this is gets really interesting. To never allow anybody to buy more than they should or less than they should in less quantity, quality combination than they should.

Not because you're going to lose money, but because you're always guiding and advising them as their most trusted advisor, and what's going to give them the best outcome for what they're doing. And sometimes letting them buy less is bad. I use an example when I did seminars and I'll use this. Can you see this?

It's a, half-filled a bottle of water. If you had a bottle of water shop and a water by a bar. And I came in and wanted to buy one half bottle of water or one half glass, let's add plastic and you sold it to me without first, making sure that I knew that I needed seven and a half more of those each and every day to keep my brain functioning, my cellular structure wearing, working.

My, uh, mine balanced and grounded my stress level down my, you know, my system flowing, you know, screening, being all those things and you let me do it without making sure I was aware you wouldn't be preeminent. You would be opportunistic. Now it doesn't mean I have to do it. If you saw me eight, eight glasses, but I only came every two days and you didn't do the same to make sure in between, I was aware that you can't save those eight glasses, you would be stealing from me.

The next thing is you have to put into words, feelings, thoughts. Aspirations, uh, uh, uh, intentions that, that, that, that the prospective buyer has never felt or experienced before. the next is you, you have a moral responsibility.

A privilege and an opportunity if you really are operating at a higher level and you're bringing a higher level of value, caring, protection, enhancement, whatever your product or service delivers to not let the person not buy from from you, if they should and not by your, from your competitor. Not because the competitors, you know, a so-and-so, but because the client will be discerned, I use the word client very, very purposely.

Most people call someone, they do business with a company. If you look up the, uh, Webster's definition, can't talk of a customer. It's someone who buys a commodity or a service. If you call me a customer, what you're saying between the lines is I'm no better than everyone else. And I'm lucky as hell that I get the business that you favor me because I have no value beyond just happenstance and fortuitous.

Good fortune my location, or as crossing paths. That's not what you want. If you call me a client. Even if you're a professional and you're dealing with patients, the patient's definition is below a client. A client is someone under the care, the protection, the wellbeing of another you have three kinds of clients.

And we're talking to entrepreneurs, business owners, you also managers. One in certainly are the ones that pay you. But the other two are the ones you pay your, your, your team members, employees, your vendors, and advisors most. And today I think it's changed, but most entrepreneurial business people try to squeeze everything they can out of their team instead of trying to grow and develop everything.

But the more you grow and develop, the more loyal, the harder working, the more valuable they become. So it's a mindset you use metaphors and similes to make your points because that's a neuro linguistically, how the mind works. Uh, I'm trying to remember. I haven't done this for so long, but that's a good start.

Does that help?

Hala_Taha: Yeah, that totally helps. So I do want to stick on this clients versus customers and just kind of drive home some points from my listener. So, first of all, this strategy of preeminence, it's about serving your clients, not selling to them. And you never, like you said, you don't want to sell them too much or too little.

You want to actually advise them to do the best thing for them. You want to be their advisor, whether there's monetary gain to that or not. And you want to be a good advisor to them while they're doing business with you before they're doing business with you. And even after they're doing business with you.

So talk to us about the importance of keeping that relationship.

Jay_Abraham: And you fall in love with your client. Most people fall in love with the wrong thing. They fall in love with their, their career or their industry or their company of being the fastest growing. That's not where you become, where you attain parameters. When you fall in love with your, your client and you live to see your product or service animated at work in their lives.

Even if you were a, an ice cream vendor in the park. You would see that for 10 or 15 minutes of solace, you give, uh, you know, someone who's taking a break from work, the chance to go back into their childhood and have a, you know, a wonderful nostalgic relief and reminiscence. And you take great pride in knowing you're creating that if you're selling something that's expensive or not, but you know that when it's at work in their life, it's protecting enhancing, enriching and entertaining.

You live with that kind of a transactional and not transactional, but, but, uh, what would I call it more of, uh, of, uh, of, uh, the animation of the product being, being, living, and functioning in somebody's life or business. Very, very key distinction. I'm sorry to step on.

Hala_Taha: No, I think that's a really great point to drive home. So you talk about your clients as your friends. And this is something that I thought was really interesting because in business, a lot of the times people say separate your business from your personal, but you're pretty adamant about saying that your clients are actually.

Great friends that you have deep relationships with. And I totally aligned to that. All my clients, I feel like are my friends, my mentors. I don't have any lines in that way. Talk to us about that and why you think that's a good mindset to have.

Jay_Abraham: You can't respect them for who they are, what they are, why they are, you can't serve them to any degree of, of meaningful, uh, uh, significance. I have a very, my wife thinks I'm, uh, uh, diabolically, uh, is, does, uh, nasty because I, when I get a prospective client, I will pop into my house with them. If we're out to lunch, when she's not expecting she and their hair is in a medicine, she's in her exercises and she's got stuff on her face, but I want to feel good inviting to my home.

And I want to see if they are real. And because I can't, I can't. Respect them. I can't serve them with full passion and paternalism and care as much if not more about them than they do, if I can't appreciate and enjoy them, not just as a source of compensation to me, but a source of meaningful, uh, stimulation, uh, value, enjoyment, and, and, uh, and worth.

And if I don't really appreciate them, I can't. And I don't take them even if they have lots of money to spend. Cause I, I know I won't serve them well because there's there, you know, it's, it's in authentic. You have.

to be to me. And I think it's true of even a job career. If you're not really passionate, I think there's three PS passion, purpose possibility.

If you're not really passionately committed to not just what you're doing, who you're doing it for, why you're doing it, what doing it for them is going to being, uh, you can't really super achieve if you're. Uh, purpose. If you don't have a greater purpose than just making money or, you know, or are making it through the day or getting to the next level, you're not going to be great.

And why would you want to be mediocre if you could be great. And if you don't see the possibilities that you uniquely can make catalytically in the interaction you have, whether it's selling somebody, managing somebody, serving somebody, then you're missing huge fulfillment. By the way, when you are preeminent, it's liberating.

It's elevating, you're operating at one of the most joyously intoxicating stratas of fulfillment of interaction of understanding. And, and it's like the whole world is a 3d movie and you have arguably the only pair of glasses. So that's quite wonderful. And I just used a metaphor to demonstrate it.

Hala_Taha: Yeah. And I want to make sure that my listeners understand what preeminence really means. It means that you're no longer knocking on doors to getting to get customers. The customers are coming to you because you're seen as the person, your clients are referring you because you're doing the best job.

You're their trusted advisor. They can't even think about anybody else who could do it better than you. So describe to us what it looks like when you are the preeminent business or person in your industry, because I want people to understand what that means and how can they tell if they have it or they don't.

Jay_Abraham: That means the first thing is that they're in the relationship for a different reason than most everyone else around or comparing. They're in it because they want to make a better contribution. They want to add more value and they understand what value means to the other side. They are not selfless.

Most selfish thing you can do is be externally focused because that's going to make, uh, the fastest, uh, the fastest, uh, uh, it's gonna, it's gonna reward you in the fastest. It means that you are always, always telling people the truth, what you feel. It means you are always making yourself aware of whatever you're doing and how it affects everyone else in the food chain.

It means that you wake up in the morning. Thinking how, if you're dealing with a lot of people as a company selling, how many, how many lives, how many companies are we going to help transform or an aunt or protect today? It means that you, you don't think in terms of how much money is it came into the cash register today.

You're thinking about how many organizations, individuals did we get the chance to serve. And then you think in terms of service, I have a very interesting, and if you read, if you didn't, it's no, no problem, but one of my first trade books, uh, which is called, uh, getting everything you can out of all you got, we made a very important point.

We said that when people go to a hardware store to buy a drill, they don't really want a drill. They want a hole. And if you think about it, As, as a consequential thing and they don't want to hold, they want to Fasten something and they don't really even want to Fasten something. They want to watch their 85 inch big screen TV tonight, uh, on Netflix, or they want to have the water come out of the new sink, or they want the lock to latch on the back door.

And when you live in that kind of a mindset, you possess the purist as single attribute that people strive for most of their life and never know how to get. And that's absolute ethical advantage over everything else. But it's pure. It's it's it's it's it's wonderful. It's uh, it's, it's, uh, it's recurring.

It's perpetual. It's very, I mean, it's just wonderful. You should be able to tell just by what's evoking. And you're also trying, you're not training either. You've probably had people you interview and they're coyly trying to manipulate the answers in a self-serving ways so they can set people up to come to them for some economic gain.

You can tell that's not my objective. I have no care one way or the other. My goal here is if I'm going to do this with you, I want to make darn sure that I'm not intellectual entertainment, that I move the people watching, listening, your respective, whether they're entrepreneurs, executives, CEOs, employees, employers, to a higher level of understanding and thus a higher level of action, transaction contribution, fulfillment, and, and that's what being preeminent.

Hala_Taha: Yeah, I got to say the strategy of preeminence. I, if I were you listening in, I would start Googling it, read Jay's articles, read Jay's book, getting everything you can out of all you've got, because it's really powerful stuff. And if you learn how to do this, it's basically learning human behavior in business and how to, how to use your human behavior in business to do the right things, serve your clients, but also, you know, generate leads without really trying that hard because you just become the best option in the market.

So I think that's really powerful.

Jay_Abraham: Great. And if you want, I mean, I have a very enlightened attitude at this point in my life. If anything that I have on that serves your people, I'll give it to you. You can put it on your, your, your website, the digital, you can put a book, that's got it. You can put a keynote. I did on it. you.

can put many instructions and I don't need to get linked on it.

It, it all comes back. It all comes back.

Hala_Taha: Thank you, Jay. I appreciate that. Um, so let's talk about another strategy that you talk about pretty often, uh, which is all about increasing your clients. And it's the difference between the Parthenon method and the diving board method. And this has to do with your marketing channels. So, um, the diving board method is really having one channel.

It's basically like a floppy diving board, there's ups and downs, uh, booms and. It's not really the best approach. And then the part, the non method is all about having multiple channels. So if you guys know what the Parthenon is, it's these Greek structures that you might've seen in your history books with a, you know, five different columns.

It's pretty sturdy. It's they last for thousands of years and you really want to go with a multi-channel approach. So talk to us about the importance of multi-channel approaches with your lead generation and why you believe in, uh, the Parthenon method.

Jay_Abraham: Uh, you started off being most businesses, ironically, uh, they, they generate most of their revenue from one source and sometimes it's a, it's a passive source, like word of mouth. And if anything happens to compromise that, you know, you can't, you know, people can't come to your store, you can't, gas prices are too expensive.

The airlines aren't flying, the airlines are flying, but nobody's in their office. You're pretty screwed. If that's the only source of revenue. You're generating or if you were just doing trade show booths during the, the worst of the, of the pandemic, what I've found, which is very interesting because I used to do this as an object lesson.

If you, when we used to have a thousand people in a seminar, I would say, okay, how many people generate their business? Um, uh, salespeople, either captive or contract and they'd stand, okay, sit down. How many do it from back then? Direct mail. How many do it? Um, social media, how many do it from Facebook and social media, sit down.

I may do it from LinkedIn's a down YouTube sit down. And when I was done, I'd say, isn't it interesting that approximately 10% get all their business from salespeople. And most of you don't have a Salesforce 20%, get it from this and you don't do that. What would happen if you added that to what you're doing, where you're getting a hundred percent of your business.

From one thing, if it was only 10 or 15% more, depending on the business, sometimes interestingly, that incremental revenue can double or triple your profit, particularly if you don't have a lot of corresponding fixed overhead, but more importantly, it leverages your advantage many ways. The first way is it lets you penetrate your market in different access vehicles that you're not getting from one thing a second, a lot of people depends on the, on the type of product service yourself.

The more expensive or the more abstract or the more conceptual, uh, it takes many different touches. Most people try to get those touches through one mechanism. But if you're touching me from many vantage points, if you have a Salesforce, if you're doing social media, if you email, if you're doing endorsements, if you're running ads on broadcast and you're doing all these, some of them don't even have to make money.

They can break even, but strategically benefit the whole of it. But you haven't introduced my three-way to go a business, but it's the ultimate exercise in working on the geometry of a business because you increase three different categories, 10%. And it's 33% increase in revenue, but if you double all three, it would be an 800%.

It seems a little confusing. But back to, to the, the power part than on if you have one, uh, revenue source and I get you to have seven or eight more in each one's only 5% more here, 8% more here, 10% here, 3%, that combination is not eight or 10, or it's more like hundreds of percent. Number one, number two, you're going to get people that you haven't been able to reach from the other ones.

Number three, you're going to be moving people who aren't yet, uh, compelled because, uh, there's a great a friend of mine named, uh, I don't remember her name now. Shoot. She did all this stuff for Salesforce and they figured it was for four or five categories of people, people who are

Hala_Taha: Bova.

Jay_Abraham: now choose. Oh, Mary Lou Tyler did. Really great person. And they wrote a book called predictable revenue, but they figured out there's four different categories of people. I think one is, you know, capable of it, not interested yet interested, but not, you know, decisive interested, but, uh, I decided to not commit it, all these things, but you're moving and you're reaching them from different vantage points.

If those of you who have ever studied military warfare, and I'm not trying to be a negativist, but the military uses the quintessential, uh, understanding of this and what is called force multiplier effect. Simply put if you and I were at war and I wanted to win, what I would do is I would use a continuous.

Uh, I would access you and I would penetrate your country from as many different concurrent vantage points as possible. I would knock out your infrastructure, your roads, your airport, should your, your rails, your, your, your ports. I would knock out your communication probably with surface to air missiles.

Then I would do bombs. Then I would do maybe attack drones. Then I would do maybe tanks. And then I might do infantry. And all I cared about was I won the war, but if you understand that the leverage in going after your market, From many different expanded, uh, approaches than your company, everything in business, whether you like it or not.

It's who's got advantage. Isn't it? That, there's a funny saying if you have 99 ways to say no, and I have a hundred ways to get you to say yes, and we stay in dialogue long enough, I win. But most people don't understand your, your, whatever you do in your life, job, career profession, business finance, you want to be engaged in, in those actions, activities moves and maneuvers that have the highest ethical probability of giving you massive advantage.

Isn't that right? So I've just learned to operate in a world where you have massive advantage over everybody else.

Hala_Taha: so you tease this out. So I want to make sure that we can cover it from my listeners. A lot of people think that there's like hundreds of ways to increase revenue and profit in a business, but you really say there's three main ways. What are those three main ways?

Jay_Abraham: Yeah, it's easy. You increase the number of buyers. You increase the size of the transaction and thus the profit that transaction yields. And then you increase the frequency or utility value of transactions. So more buyers higher, uh, higher sales per transaction, more transactions longer. If you do all it, just one of those, it's an incremental growth, but if you do all three together and you increase them, it's a geometric growth.

Uh there's there's you know, and there's probably 30 ways?

in each of those categories that most people wouldn't even think of. But, uh, I mean, I'll give you the most hilarious thing that I, I have discovered in my work and it's something that's close to my heart. So if you had, again, use our hypothetical thousand people in a seminar room who were entrepreneurs or business, uh, heads, and you ask them, does any part of your business come from referral or word of mouth, unless they're, you know, unless they're a very unique type of a business that's so private and personal that nobody would tell anyone else the odds are that 5%, 10%, sometimes a hundred percent comes.

So we would interview the people and say, if at least 20 to a hundred percent of your business comes from referral, word of mouth scan, And we'd say remain standing. And then I would randomly, this is hilarious. I would randomly pick 20 it's. Okay. Tell me the percentage and the dollars at somebody profound.

A hundred percent, $5 million, uh, uh, 40%, 800,000, uh, 30%, $10 million. Then I'd say, remain standing. Now only if you and your business have in place right now, at least one formalized systematized. Uh, strategic referral generating approach that everyone uses constantly at, at, at appropriate points. 95% of the people that said, yes, sit down.

Then I'd say two approaches, 95% of the five, sit down three, they all sit down. Then I'd say, well, we've, we've studied. When you study at a thousand industries, we've found a hundred and twenty five, one to five. They're not all great ones, different referral generating systems or strategies that could be used.

But then I'd say everybody that sat down, raise your hand. If you spend any money on sales people, social media trade show booths, and almost everybody did. And I'd say, well, let me ask you what's wrong with this picture. I believe that a externally generated lead buyer as very low trust, you got to move them from low trust is sort of trust to commit a trust.

And even when they buy the first. They're not totally trusting. They're sort of like that. Whereas a referral generated buyer buys immediately trust to me, lean negotiates, last buys, larger quantities buys more buys more often is more interesting and enjoyable to deal with cost you nothing and refers more people.

So what's wrong with this picture, but I mean, I've been taught by masters to think differently, and I hope this comes across and helps people shift a little bit, their mental model and, and maybe, uh, flips their, their worldview a little bit more towards strategic consequential, uh, correlated thinking.

Hala_Taha: Yeah. And that's why this kind of goes back to the strategy of preeminence. When you act as a trusted advisor and always act in the best interest of your clients, they'll heavily recommend you to, to everybody else because they're being a good friend by recommending the best of the best. So, one thing that I wanted to ask you, which is a personal question, to be honest, is, do you provide some sort of incentive for clients who refer other clients or do you, or do you like, do you discount?

They provide a referral.

Jay_Abraham: I have a standard, uh, an and I've helped them in very blessed. I've helped perhaps 308 class experts, uh, authors trainers, people like Tony and Damon, and they know that anybody significant, they ever want to refer to me, I'll buy them two hours of no, no costs and no, uh, no self-serving strategy, you know, uh, uh, expert, uh, assessment.

Everybody knows that. Secondly, I think we tend to almost over contribute when we do anything that is, let's say sample my methodology or my mindset. We give so much that it's only. Unprecedented. And, you know, if you go to my website, which I'm not pushing for eight years, I didn't even ask for an opt in because I was disgusted by all the purveyors of hyperbolic shit that, excuse my vulgarity, that we're just trying to get people's.

So we operate very differently. I'm very eclectic, probably, um, maybe a little icon of clastic, but, but I always try to give freely, and I always try to do things that are in the best interest of the client. Last month, for example, I had a very lucrative client that got into trouble and I have a contract with them and they were willing to honor it, but it wasn't in their best interest.

So I let them out, but I gave them three months access just because it was the right thing to do it. If you're playing the game at a higher level, you're having a good time. And you're, you're, you're, you're almost. Intuitively driven and fueled by, by the ability to resonate any queued, far more value. But I don't, I'm not, I don't bribe anyone.

In other words, if you said, Jay, uh, if I give you a client, will you give me something? I would say, yes, I'll give you a thank you. Maybe I'll send you a really beautiful, I've got a client that sells $500 boxes of chocolate, but I'm not going to give you money because I don't want it to be induced by anything.

But your preeminent belief that your client will be better served or you will be better served by me and that, and, and you know, it doesn't mean that's the best thing to do. And when I hear people go, okay, you mean giving me a kickback? I go, Jesus. I mean, there are, there are strategies where if it's fully disclosed, I've done it for clients where we had people recommend them.
And we told them that we were receiving a modest participation, but in exchange for that, we were that, that audiences, ombudsman, we were negotiating better pricing, better benefits, better protection, risk reversal, and better bonuses. And that if there was any ever any problem or discrepancy, we were there to serve them.

But we were not saying that they had to buy that person. We were saying that we represented them in a ethical, fully disclosed matter, but I think integrity is the key to everything.

Hala_Taha: Yeah, I totally agree. I haven't done that. I was just wondering, cause I know that a lot of people want some sort of, um, like recurring fee. Some, some, some people like I've gotten some people saying they either want a discount or they want some sort of referring fee for referring people, but I totally am aligned with you.

It's kind of just like, if I get a referral, I get a referral.

Jay_Abraham: mean I won't serve somebody. I will help almost anybody that wants to help me and I'll help them, even if they don't succeed. If I see that they really went the extra mile and they truthfully did everything possible and it didn't work out, but I don't believe in compromising my integrity to get business, because I think that if you do that, then you sold out.

I want people to come to me, just like you, you, uh, seem to, because of the value we represent above and beyond the maddening crowd and, and the, uh, and the result, the benefit, the, you know, the outcome that someone will get. But it doesn't mean I'm unwilling to add value beyond some economic. Now that's different than if you retain someone whose job it is to find business and give that person a patient.

That's a difference. Somebody who says yes, I'm representing Jay by job is to source for him. Qualified seemingly compatible companies. He can work long-term on and share profits. That's different. I have those, but if somebody just says, Hey, Jay, I want to refer a client to you. I would say I'm thrilled if you're doing it for the right reason.

And if I can help you with your business reciprocally, I will be happy to. But I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, uh, uh, I just don't want to compromise what I think I stand for. And a lot of times we think, you know, we see ourselves in a, maybe more delusional at elevation of, of, uh, of, uh, significance than we are, but I'd like to hope that I operate in a unique rarefied.
And it sounds like you do too. And it's, it's, you know, that's the reason if people need to be, you know, to be bribed, to do what's best at people, they care about they are anything but preeminent, they're not looking after the best interests. They're looking out average, honestly, short-term after their own.

So Yeah.

Hala_Taha: No. I love that. I think that was a great answer. So I know we are, we have about four minutes left. And so I do want to ask you the last question, which I ask all of my guests, and that is what is your secret to profiting in life. And you can take this any direction that you want.

Jay_Abraham: Yeah, well, so many, I mean, I've been so blessed by people. I've learned that wealth and compensation are denominated. The nominated many ways only one of which is financial. So profiting in life means constantly learning profiting in life means constantly contributing, profiting in life means, uh, being able to, uh, associate with really interesting quality people that expand and challenge and enrich you profiting in life means, uh, that at the end of your life, you can, or whoever is going to speak for, you says that was a life worth well lived in service to others.

Uh, you know, we are, this is a very simple, but, uh, true. And I got this from somebody else's not original. You're rewarded in your life in direct proportion to the quantity, quality, consistency of problems you solve for others and opportunity to make possible. I have hopeless curiosity. I love everyone. And if I tell you one of my favorite things to do, when I used to travel all over the world, we would go to Asia all the time and I had a protocol.

Now I'll tell you this, cause it was maybe it'll be a great conclusion to this conversation. I would always get to go first class on the airline of my choice. And they usually would be an airline with great wines and liquor. So I would drink a meaningfully. And so the first day I'd get somewhere I hydrate and sleep.

The second day I always went three or four days early. I would go to the lobby of the hotel, normally a nice one. And I would sit in the lobby, smiling at people for four hours until they smiled. Then I would get in the elevator and I would stand at the door facing in, not out smiling until people did the same.

And then I would get off on all the floors and walk back and forth, engaging sincerely, respectfully, meaningfully, and appreciatively the housekeepers, even though we didn't speak, uh, always the same language or the servers. And you could tell that they felt acknowledged and I felt great, but I think that, that, uh, somebody taught me one more thing and they said, if you don't know what you stand for, you know, why you stand for it, who you stand for, what standing for it means, then you have no sense of who you are

Hala_Taha: Yeah, I love that. I think that is so powerful. Jay, you are a legend. Thank you so much for joining us. I hope you enjoyed this conversation.

Jay_Abraham: That's great questions that I'm flattered to have been your guests. And I hope that I gave you whatever you were after and that it has an impact on the people that watch or listen.

Hala_Taha: Oh, 100%. Well, and I can't wait to recap this later on in our out show. So where can our listeners go find everything about you and what you do?

Jay_Abraham: Uh, if they are, uh, you know, if they are, uh, career type people or smaller, we give away better stuff on our abraham.com, uh, than most people sell. So they can go there with economic dinner, not there's 800 different resources, books, and courses and interviews and, and all kinds of things that will help them if they're large enough and they want to explore any kind of relationship, go to J a [email protected].

But, you know, it's, we just, and there's plenty of stuff online and I'll give you anything that Brian, uh, connects with you that you want to give your people. So then it would have to go there. But yeah, I mean, I'm on a pension at this point in my life. Ew. Ew, Ew. I mean, uh, I, I had another influence, pretty cool.

He said he went through a lot of trauma and he came up with a really great, uh, it was a catharsis that led to a really a profound transformation. He said his belief is anytime you interact with any person, anybody, for any reason, for any amount of time, your job, your purpose, your opportunity, your privilege is to make the other side better off because you were in their life.

Even if it's just listening, even if it's a smile, it and most people are. So self-consumed today that if I can leave with anything, I think it's try to be externally focused. It's much more satisfying and it's frankly much more enriching in all forms, including financial. Okay.

Hala_Taha: Amazing. Thank you so much, tuning in, go to Jay abraham.com. I know you have a meeting to head out to, so I'm going to let you go and let's connect, uh, whenever you'd like. Thank you so much, Jay.

Jay_Abraham: Well, thank you. And I appreciate it a lot. You ask great questions and you have a vibration sort of an effervescent, um, uh, you're intoxicating in the most positive way. Thank you

Hala_Taha: Thank you so much.

Jay_Abraham: Okay.

Hala_Taha: Bye. Thank you.